They Gave it All up for Medicine

Two fourth-year medical students explain why they traded high-paying jobs on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley to go back to school and become doctors.

DAN MOLLURA graduated from Cornell in 1994 and went straight into a job as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, the classy Wall Street investment firm. Working in the white-hot area of broadcasting and cable television, he put together investment opinions for big buyers and sellers. But nagging at Mollura all the time was a passion for helping others. In 1996, he left Wall Street to volunteer at St. Vincent's Hospital and at a mental health center in Manhattan. In 1999, he enrolled at the School of Medicine. Now 30, Mollura is applying for residencies in internal medicine.

What was it like at Goldman Sachs?
The culture is incredibly supportive and you're working with a lot of smart individuals. In many ways, it actually reminds me of Hopkins because the work ethic was intense, and there was such a belief in their own position in the world.

You were doing well. Why didn't you stay?
When I was hired by Goldman, I wondered what I was going to do about service. It wasn't going to get pushed away. I had this feeling inside me that somehow I needed to personally and directly help people. I'll never forget my first day on the job. Someone was giving me a tour of the firm and showing me all these great trade desks and all the screens around the world and stock tickers, and I, very naively, asked, "So how do we help people?" My guide stopped in midsentence, looked at me and said, "Dan, this isn't the Peace Corps, you know."

When did you first start thinking about medicine?
The seed of medicine came in my junior year in college when I went to the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky to do some service work. For the first time, I was visiting people, I was talking to them, I was learning about their experiences. Later, I volunteered with psychiatric patients and loved the way the doctors thought about problems with compassion, then synthesized data, evaluated the person and came up with a plan. They could think about issues socially, scientifically and biologically.

How did your Wall Street colleagues react when they found out you were going into medicine?
They said that doctors aren't making as much money anymore. One person said, "Oh what a crappy business that is!"

Did you find any overlap at all between what you learned at Goldman Sachs and practicing medicine?
In medicine, we interpret our history and the physical-our data sets-from our lab testing and radiological studies and come up with an assessment. There's a certain amount of risk in that assessment. Wall Street is exactly the same way. You're constantly having to take a stand. You're having to counsel people through these decisions in much the same way that I counsel somebody about a treatment decision.

COLLEEN JOHNSON, the daughter of two Billings, Mont., physicians, was a high-school math and science wizard and graduated from MIT as a rare female electrical engineering major. In 1995, with both a bachelor's and master's degree in hand, she joined a training program for future engineering managers at Intel, the world's largest maker of computer chips. Eventually, she landed in the specialty of computer architecture, and by her third year at Intel, her career began to take off. But by then, she'd begun thinking of switching careers. Johnson says it will probably now take at least five more years (until she's finished her medical training) for her annual income to equal what it was eight years ago when she began work at Intel. At 31, she is applying for residencies in general internal medicine.

What was it that made you decide to switch fields?
Intel is very big. You have to be a self-starter. You can sit for months just learning, and of course that means you don't produce much. You can see a project you've worked on for months all of a sudden be discontinued. I kind of had to find my own direction, and that can take time. Eventually, though, I was working on a project that had a lot more clout. I started working with customers and presenting at meetings. I had a couple of other people working for me and was getting some supervisory experience. So there I was, in my last eight months at Intel with the job finally starting to go my way, and I had already begun to look into other things.

Were you sure you wanted medicine?
At nights, I was taking premed classes at San Jose State, but in my lunch hour, I was teaching a math class at a nearby middle school. I really thought I was going to go into teaching, because at MIT I had been a very successful teacher, and it was great. But I eventually learned that I'm horrible at teaching kids who aren't motivated. I don't relate. So I started looking into medicine.

What was the reaction when you shared your decision?
My friends were like, "What are you doing?" I have a lot of friends who think that if I had worked for a different company, I would have possibly stayed in engineering. But I don't know.

How easy was it to adjust to being a student again?
I had thought the average age of first-year medical students was 26, but it was actually 24! I was easily four years older. That was a huge difference after working and living on my own. So there I was. I had an apartment full of furniture, I had a cat, I had a life. I would become impatient when people in class talked in a lecture or fell asleep. I would think, "You go down there and feel like what it's like to talk in front of 120 people." But slowly, over time, I adjusted to being a student. I found out I love learning. It was great to be back in school again.

Did you make the right choice?
You know, it's so funny because just like there is no one right person for you, I don't think there's one right field. I probably could have stayed in engineering and been happy. I do miss being around a big group of people you work with every day and know really well. But when I'm a physician. I know I will love being with my own patients. I'm very glad I made the switch.