I'm the guy eggman is referring to :) Thanks for all the info!

No I do not like working with people. I would aim for surgery or radiology for this reason. I currently do not perform well under social pressure but my anxiety should diminish with time. Yes, I think I am good at explaining things in simple terms. I prefer less social interaction. I could tolerate a strict hierarchy. I don't handle sleep deprivation well. I do not handle uncertainty particularly well. Yes, I think I could handle accidents better than most people.

Med school isn't generally about that. Would it be agony for him to memorize loads of facts without questioning/understanding them too much, then forget them because he doesn't need them for anything? Also, much of the stuff you have to memorize after the first 1-2 years has nothing to do with human biology. There are some challenging moments with complicated patients, but the work is mostly quite simple and algorithmic.

That's bad news but not a deal breaker.

There is a hermeneutical constellation of belief systems that posits texts speaking for themselves without any interpretation and announces that meanings are clear to the newcomer, or outsider, or even the barely literate, in ways they were never clear to bodies of scholars who gave their lives to the study of the same texts. I'm not sure you want to be in that constellation. That is Constellation Fundamentalism, though to be fair to the actual fundamentalists, they don't seem to be amenable to animal bloodsports at all.

To be fair to this idea, it can be useful to approach things from a fresh perspective. Scholars have had longer to develop the more ... complex misinterpretations.

The trouble springs up when you don't check the, y'know, facts. Like the original text your copy was translated from, say. Or the culture it was written in. Or logic.

(Or, in the opposite case, declaring that your once-over the text has revealed what believers "really" believe.)

With regards to (2), I think you’re confusing first-year war games with actual combat magic.

Actual “I really want to kill you” spells are probably much more powerful. Fiendfyre for example has at least the destructive potential of a tank, and in canon even Goyle could cast it. (It’s hard to control, but then again so is a tank.) Avada Kedavra can probably kill you even through a nuclear bunker wall, and it can be used by at least some teenagers. Sectumsempra is probably a instant-kill against a muggle, even with body armor, and it was invented by Snape while he was still a student.

By contrast, pretty much the most powerful potential weapon normal people (well, outside the US at least) have ready access to is a car, and a very tiny fraction of people can easily make something much more destructive than a crude bomb. Also, due to the effects of magic on electronics, pretty much everything other than kinetic impactors would be fried by any kind of spell that manages to connect.

We’re never shown really bad stuff, and during a discussion in MoR it’s mentioned that thermonuclear weapons are only a bit worse than most really bad spells, and that Atlantis was erased from time.

The highest earning careers generally* are medicine, law, and finance. For medicine, you'll need a specific major (biology and chemistry, usually). For law, you can have any major. For finance, you can have any quantitative major. Thus, I'd recommend you either go medicine or not medicine and pick either biology/chemistry, math/economics, math/computer science, or economics/computer science for your major, depending on skills and interest.

Don't worry as much about overloading your coursework as getting good grades in your classes. High GPA matters a lot for law, and somewhat for medicine and finance. Law and finance don't really care too much about what your majors are or what specific classes you've taken.

Take internships as often as possible. I think it's better to take more prestigious internships than internships relevant to your field, but I could be wrong about that.

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Networking. Stanford's statistics on how 2011-2012 graduates found jobs indicates that around 29% of them got jobs through networking.

This is important, yes. Put some thought into it, but if you're doing things right, in my experience, it should evolve largely naturally. Just make sure to record who you've met and some guesses as to how they could help you. I have a spreadsheet.

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Some way of signalling leadership skills? Maybe I could try to get into a leadership position at a student club or something.

Yes, plus self-direction and management skills, which are more important. Take a leadership position because you're passionate about the club, though, not for overt signaling.

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Honors programs, or doing research. Do employers care about this?

Depends on the employer and the research / program. Generally these can be high prestige, which is good. But a trading firm probably won't care about your english literature research or research on fern mating cycles, etc. Good research projects do demonstrate you can write and think quantitatively, though, which could be an asset.

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*This might be naïve though, because it doesn't factor in cost of living, social environment, cost of school (especially law and medical school), or amount of hours worked. On a per hour basis, I suspect these jobs aren't as high income as they seem.

That still isn't obvious to me and I still think you're comparing apples and durians.

OP is going to Stanford, so a career at GS, Deutsche Bank, JPM, or Bridgewater is a realistic possiblity in a way it simply isn't at 99.9% of schools.

The average physician makes far less over his lifetime than he could applying the same horsepower and hours worked to, say, finance. It's a fairly straightforward back-of-the-envelope calculation.

That doesn't seem obvious to me. Can I see that calculation? I suspect you're comparing the absolute top-of-the-line financial career trajectory (which is very very hard to achieve) with a typical doctor path.

If you're interested in maximizing income, I would rule out pre-med. It's sub-optimal preparation for any career except medicine, and medicine is sub-optimal for income. A few reasons:

Salaries are essentially capped by reimbursement rates and man-hours. The best surgeon in the world isn't going to make more than a few million a year doing elective surgeries twelve hours a day year round.

The things that generate the most income for rich people with MD's, patents and start-ups and C-suite gigs, don't require the MD credential. There are better stepladders. The possible exception is medical celebrity, but the odds of you being the next Dr. Oz are extremely low.

The average physician makes far less over his lifetime than he could applying the same horsepower and hours worked to, say, finance. It's a fairly straightforward back-of-the-envelope calculation. In addition to losing seven to ten years of income after college (residency only pays a little above living wages) and possibly incurring $250K in student debt when money means the most due to time-value, you'll graduate into a market absolutely determined (for very understandable reasons) to bend the healthcare cost curve down and pay doctors less. American doctors are currently paid much, much better than doctors almost everywhere else in the world, due in large part to guild-like protections, and this cannot continue indefinitely. Globalization's already lined up to crush radiology and elective surgery, two of the better-remunerated fields, and IBM would very much like to put oncologists everywhere out of a job. Another half-dozen specialties are in turf battles against mid-level providers like nurses.

All that said, I highly recommend medicine. Just not for optimized philanthropy.

If you're interested in maximizing income, I would rule out pre-med. It's sub-optimal preparation for any career except medicine, and medicine is sub-optimal for income. A few reasons:

Salaries are essentially capped by reimbursement rates and man-hours. The best surgeon in the world isn't going to make more than a few million a year doing elective surgeries twelve hours a day year round.

The things that generate the most income for rich people with MD's, patents and start-ups and C-suite gigs, don't require the MD credential. There are better stepladders. The possible exception is medical celebrity, but the odds of you being the next Dr. Oz are extremely low.

The average physician makes far less over his lifetime than he could applying the same horsepower and hours worked to, say, finance. It's a fairly straightforward back-of-the-envelope calculation. In addition to losing seven to ten years of income after college (residency only pays a little above living wages) and possibly incurring $250K in student debt when money means the most due to time-value, you'll graduate into a market absolutely determined (for very understandable reasons) to bend the healthcare cost curve down and pay doctors less. American doctors are currently paid much, much better than doctors almost everywhere else in the world, due in large part to guild-like protections, and this cannot continue indefinitely. Globalization's already lined up to crush radiology and elective surgery, two of the better-remunerated fields, and IBM would very much like to put oncologists everywhere out of a job. Another half-dozen specialties are in turf battles against mid-level providers like nurses.

All that said, I highly recommend medicine. Just not for optimized philanthropy.

It's plausible to me that a much higher proportion of peeps than is generally realized operate substantially better on different sleep schedules to what a 9-5 job forces, in which case enforced maximal (or at least, greater) use of daylight hours is possibly taking place on a societal (global?) level, though not as strongly as in militaries.