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I really want to avoid invoking any cliches to the effect of "youth is wasted on the young" here, but even though that's an unfair generalization, there's still a grain of truth to the sentiment: there are certain aspects of life which truly cannot be understood except by irrevocable passage of time. I hate to say it, but many of the insights that might help you navigate your current situation are of that nature, so it's possibly that they could be misunderstood, but I'll try nonetheless. One thing (among many) I didn't (couldn't) appreciate when I was your age, Is just how much of my life was still ahead of me. The notion that your path will be set in stone based solely on how you spend the next five years is silly, but it's an easy assumption to make, since it's what you're currently focused on, and (if your upbringing was anything like mine) there are probably lots of people insisting that this is a life-or-death situation. Secondly (and I'm not sure whether this will come as a comfort or not), your dreams might change. What if you push through your current program and end up hating the field? Or get into a PhD in the US and hate it here? What if you become a medical researcher and find you hate that? Or decide to become a physician and hate it (while still harboring a love of machine learning)? And what if you suddenly decide that you'd like to pursue something altogether different than CS or medicine? I'm not saying that because the outcome is unpredictable you should just choose a direction blindly. Rather, you shouldn't stress too much about whether your path will line up with your current passions. Ultimately, your interests may change in ways that you can't anticipate, but you're young, and (per paragraph 2) you'll have lots of time to change your mind in the future. If this advice seems unhelpful, I understand (per paragraph 1), since none of it addresses what you should actually do. But, whether you realize it or not, this isn't actually a question about what you should do, it's a question about what you value in life. For what its worth, none of the imagined outcomes (ML PhD, Med School, SE) seem like a terrible fate to me, so you should just follow your heart. |