Thank you for the thoughtful response. Switching to medicine is something I've been contemplating for a couple of months and though about all pros & cons, best-, worst-, average-, expected outcomes extensively, yet I still feel at a lock. To put it shortly, my best case is better staying at my current program and my worst case is worse. The average case is too difficult to determine as the probabilities I assign to each case are speculative.

As for a PhD in medicine being easier, I don't mean that doing the actual PhD is easier but rather the entrance requirements are. The medical school in my country is good so I can just do my PhD there which would be quite easy. On the other hand, the technical school I'm in doesn't have that much research in machine learning so I'd have to apply abroad which would make things much harder. Not to mention that machine learning is a hot area and perhaps the most competitive of all PhD-subjects.

Is your dream a PhD in machine learning, or to work on difficult machine learning problems? Many people (most, probably) come out of their PhD less happy than they were before, maybe there is a different way you can pursue this interest? If you even have a chance of becoming a PhD candidate, I assume you already have some skills in the subject that you could apply at a corporate job, on an OSS project, etc. I understand the appeal of "pure" research, but there are other paths as well.

I don't know much about the field so I can only guess, but maybe you can find some people here or elsewhere to talk about this who have the relevant experience?

My dream is to improve & develop new machine learning algorithms. Weather I'd do this as a researcher or through a private company doesn't really matter to me. It just seems to be a prerequisite to have done a PhD to most such positions I see ( Take Google Brain as an example).

Unfortunately, there aren't too many people/research in my interest area in my country, but I'll try to ask my classmates. Thanks for your comment!

This is very good advice and I feel like you've gotten at the heart of the issue. The way you frame it makes it obvious to me that what you're saying is very true, and is not something I've thought about as explicitly as you stated. Thank you!

Since that seems to be resonating for you, I think you owe it to yourself to at least test the hypothesis before deciding not to do your original plan. I'm just repeating here what quantumite already said, but I wanted to comment from personal experience. I dropped out of mathematics when, around the time my first kid was born, I suddenly started to feel like my brain was paralyzed and unable to think mathematically anymore. I remember blankly staring at textbook pages for hours, unable to do any exercises at all. I didn't talk to anyone about it at the time, just concluded that I had lost all my ability, and suffered in silence.

Only years later did it occur to me that it might have simply been burnout, and with the right kind of coaching I might have been able to continue. So that's the other bit I'd suggest, besides just taking a rest: find some people who can advise you about this and who you have a good connection with personally. Don't just go through it on your own. Something that may not be obvious to you at all might be the first thing to occur to a more experienced person with your best interests at heart, and it might turn out to be a big deal. You don't need to deprive yourself of help.

Medicine is crazy hard... way harder than ML/CS I think. Particularly emotionally hard.

Regarding a PhD, I am a Mexican who was "just ok" in a no-name Mexican college where I studied my BSc Computer Science.

I got a scholarship for the UK to do PhD in CS on a 'red brick' university. It was amazing and life changing. So you being on eastern europe surely can easily get somewhere good as well.

Dont give up your dream! Specially when your dream is so fucking profitable. (If you told me it was arts or something similar I would have doubts).

Thanks for the response! Interesting comment :) I do however suspect that the "entitlement" you see among medical students has more to due with societal prestige than selection process, but this is pure speculation of course.

Yeah that's probably true :D it was just hard to imagine myself working with this kind of people for the rest of my life :O (of course not everyone was like this...)

OP here. To be clear, I'm referring to studying in school and not career-work. In my country it would be very non-controversial to say that the program I'm currently in is significantly harder and more time-consuming than medicine. I think this is due in part to the fact that medicine is 6 years here, as opposed to 4 years in some countries. Average workload for a medical student is around 40h/week including lectures with only P/F grading, while at my program it's around 52h/week on average and my guess is around 60h/week for good grades. Every one of my classmates who has a good GPA puts in 60h+/week.

Then the medical school you refer to is probably not worth it (I would never choose to visit a doctor, who didn't study harder than a programmer).

Being born in eastern europe myself I know of plenty of shitty schools, both medical and engineering.

I mean it ranks very well and the school itself has some very good research output. I need to reiterate, it's a 6 year degree and not 4 years. The workload is about the same for all medical schools in my country. I think the workload is similar to a CS degree at some good university but that's mostly speculation on my part.

First of all, thanks for your input and sharing your experience. I think I'm a similar position to you for as so far that I don't really love math enough. My main motivator for doing it is to become more competent for other things I'm actually very interested in (algorithms, machine learning etc.). It's a means to an end and therefore a chore in some ways.

To put frame it in a more positive light: I'm confident that if I am able to grind through the first years of math, things will get much easier due to my much higher interest and a less workload during the latter years. There is some career/research advice that goes along the lines of "do what you think about when you shower". When I'm showering I often think about something relating to machine learning or similar.

As for medicine not being less mentally challenging, I don't think that holds true in my country. I know it's the case in most countries but here medicine is 6y and average study time is around 40h/week with only P/F grading.

It's sort of the problem I'm facing here. Research in machine learning is weak in my country, so I'd probably have to apply elsewhere. Medical research here is very good though, so I would have no problem just staying here as there are multiple good advisors. This is what makes A PhD in machine learning so much more difficult.

This is the situation I'm in. I feel like it not be feasible for me to keep up with the very high workload for another 4-years, hence why I'm considering switching to medicine. I know realize this sounds provocative but it's not intentional, medicine is genuinely quite a bit easier here than the program I'm in. Probably quite comparable to a regular engineering degree from a good university.

OP here. This is country dependent. From most I've heard medicine is one of the or the most difficult program to study in most countries workload wise. In the country I live it's quite different. From what I've gathered, the average seems to be 40h/week including lectures with only P/F. This might be due to medicine being a 6 year program as opposed to 4 years such as in the US. I'd put the difficulty to be quite comparable to a good CS or engineering program. I think the dropout-rate is ~10% which is very low.

Thank you for your comment. My main goal isn't to become a physician but rather go into research but it's still something I think I'd enjoy if things don't work out. Out of curiosity, what do these medical school grads do after skipping residency?

I've seen some go into medically oriented startups. I worked on a project for one oriented towards using machine learning to read medical notes. Look up my email in my profile and I'll see if I can get you more info about that.