How to Pursue Your Medical Career

Physical therapy activities at the 20th Genera...

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Medical fields are expanding greatly and are expected to increase over the next several years. There are a number of reasons for the increased need in all medical careers. One need is the quality of health care extends life expectancies. At the same time, the baby boomer generation is aging.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics expects physical therapy employment needs to increase by one-third. These jobs offer salaries starting around $75,000. Pursing any medical career can be rewarding, both emotionally and financially.

All medical careers require some form of additional education after high school. These jobs focus on helping people in a specific field. Pursuing a field that allows you to work more independently from supervisors will require a Master’s or doctorate degree. These higher-level careers also pay the most in salaries.

Start pursuing your medical career in high school. Even if you do not know the specific career field, take math and science courses. This will prepare you to earn better grades in college. You will need to maintain a grade point average of 3.5 or higher for many medical career fields. Some courses allow students to maintain a 3.0, so check with the school and specific state requirements.

Depending on the career area and level you wish to achieve, you may need an associate’s, bachelor’s, Master’s or doctorate degree. For example, a medical career in physical therapy includes a therapist who needs a Master’s, a physical therapy assistant which requires a bachelor’s, and the therapy aid requires an associate’s. These levels have varying pay scales and may require additional on-the-job training.

A medical career is a job for someone who wants to help other people meet their personal goals. Good communication and a resource of employment contacts will be helpful in your career pursuit.

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Education: The Stamina to Get You Going

Whether you’re attending a technical school, receiving your secondary education, going through post-graduate school or receiving your education online, you’ll need the stamina to get going and keep going.

And while a cup of coffee or a Coke may get you up in the morning, by mid-day you might be struggling to keep your eyes open. School is a lot of brain work, and because of that, we can get tired. We may find ourselves falling asleep in class, not being able to focus, or we may get stuck on understanding the work we knew the day before.

The good news is that there are things we can do to keep our minds active and productive. Here are a few hints:

  • Take a break. If you’ve been studying for an hour or more, take a 15 minute break. Get up and walk around. Experience a change of scenery.
  • Eat decently. If you’re eating junk food because of the ease in preparing it, reconsider what you could be eating instead. Preparation will take you longer, but your mind will have that much longer of a ride.
  • Get enough sleep. Don’t do the all-nighters — rather, study your classes as you go, take notes, and carry around note cardsto which you can add information.
  • Get some exercise. This applies especially if you’re taking online courses that keep you primarily at your computer. Study your cards as you go for a walk or go swimming at the local pool and take your books to study as you tan.

Keeping your stamina up is no small task, it takes as much thought as doing the work for your classes, but with forethought comes the greatest success — great grades.

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Trade Schools Prepare Students for Careers

Let’s face the facts: not every high school student wants to attend college. Instead of looking down on this choice, schools should respect it by offering a wider range of educational programs that meet the needs of all students. That’s where trade and technical schools offer advantages that many high schools fail to address the realistic needs of today’s students.

Learning a Trade at School

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The typical high school teaches students how to do math, understand literature and spot the number of electrons in a molecule. All of these skills have great importance to some people. Young chemists, for instance, need high school teachers who can show them how to use laboratory equipment. The average person, however, needs something different. He needs a trade.

Trade Schools Focus on Marketable Skills

Trade schools can teach students marketable skills that will help them get jobs after graduation. A student doesn’t need a college education to become a car mechanic. She needs experience under the hood of a car. A trade school with an automotive program can help her get started so that she can find a well-paying job as a young adult. Instead of working in a gas station, she can earn more money in a repair shop.

Trade schools, of course, can offer a wider range of skills than just auto repair. Some trade schools offer classes in subjects such as

If your children have interest in these or similar careers, then consider finding a trade school in your area with classes that can give them a head start in their careers.

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Do School Voucher Programs Benefit Students?

It’s no surprise that parents want their children to have as many educational opportunities as possible. Good education opportunities often lead to more rewarding careers. When it comes to school voucher programs, many parents don’t care about anything other than whether the programs can offer better opportunities than public school.

Avery Coonley School student with tablet computer.

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The Advantage of Voucher Schools

From a theoretical perspective voucher schools make sense. By allowing private schools to compete with each other, educational opportunities should improve in an area. The best schools will attract more students and money. They will, therefore, win in the marketplace of ideas and have a positive effect on other schools.

The Disadvantages of Voucher Schools

Unfortunately, each private school can only accept a certain number of students each year. It only makes sense, then, that they choose the best and brightest students in the area. Without the best students, the schools wouldn’t look successful, which would mean fewer parents would want to send their kids there.

By funneling public money towards private schools, local governments make it impossible to fund public education systems that accept all students, regardless of how well they perform. A public school, therefore, might have lower test scores than a voucher school. That’s not necessarily because the public school offers an inferior program, but rather because the voucher school has taken the best students.

A Terrible Divide

This creates a divide between students by giving the best opportunities to children that perform well at a young age and essentially giving up on those that do not show the same level of promise.

The question, therefore, becomes not whether voucher schools can benefit students, but rather which students they can help. If your kid doesn’t fall into the elite category, then she will have fewer opportunities to succeed. That doesn’t sound so great for students or communities.

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Should High Schools Include Creationism in Their Curricula?

When it comes to high school education, few subjects incite more fights than evolution. Many parents have argued that schools should “teach the controversy.” In other words, public schools should provide information about evolution and creationism. This allows the students to make up their own minds. Unfortunately for supporters of creation science, though, this argument doesn’t stand against even the lightest scrutiny.

Is Creationism Science?

In order for science teachers to offer information about creation science (AKA intelligent design) to students, the state board of education must decide that creationism contains some scientific merit. After all, you would not expect to teach literature in a biology class. If it isn’t science, then it had no place in a high school biology class.

Supporters of creationism often have difficulty understanding why scientists so often tell them that intelligent design doesn’t belong in a biology classroom. The supporters point to data, asking whether that doesn’t make intelligent design a form of science.

It doesn’t.

Scientists base hypotheses, theories and laws on usefulness. A theory must make a prediction about the world. It can’t simply describe a static event.

The theory of natural selection, for instance, predicts that some animals will have traits that allow them to mate more successfully pass on their genetic material to a larger number of offspring, and that this creates change over time. This has been shown accurate time and time again. Any person can recreate these experiments with fruit flies.

Creationism, however, doesn’t offer predictions about the world. It doesn’t have answers for what will happen tomorrow. Even from this limited perspective, it cannot qualify as science. High school biology instructors, therefore, have no business teaching it in their classes.

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