To wonder how smart do you actually have to be for some professions?

[Jigaliga]

Inspired by a comment on another thread...

Do you really have to be genuinely intelligent to be a doctor, lawyer, etc? Or is it just putting in the grind and a good education?

I guess to be an academic you would have to be intelligent. To be a barrister too, but maybe not to be a solicitor? What about accountants?

This is what I’ve seen. Basic Incompetent getting good jobs via their connections, and then being carried/ supported by lower paid more able staff.
my experience sending two DCs to private schools after many years in the state system was how these schools maximize the more average students to get the results for good degrees/ universities/ professions. They instill confidence and entitlement and foster connections that can pay off later.

Exactly. And the lower paid member of staff usually had to struggle for the opportunity, or needs a good reference, so they can't just refuse to carry the can for Boss Buddy.

Either the incompetent ends up with a job for life, and everyone else learns to work around them, or they get promoted to middle management, to "work" from home at a higher wage. But at least they're out of everyone else's hair, and now the boss can rehire for their original position without losing face! Nepo hire is still a drain on the company being unfairly rewarded, of course, but it all worked out in the end. Didn't it? 🙄

A comment was made about my sister in primary school that at least she was pretty and hopefully she would make a great wife as she wasn't academic in the slightest. Got to secondary school and did her exams but didn't get the grades she needed to be a nurse but got into a psychology course and won the court medal twice and has her masters and doctorate now, she found something she really loved and it showed that she was very intelligent just school didn't challenge her.

My DD got no connections from school at all. No one did what she does. Plus lots of dc have confidence and intelligence. Private schools don’t get you a job.

@TizerorFizz I can assure you, when I was a junior doctor working in a very busy hospital on an acute medical or surgical ward, there were plenty of weekends when I arrived at work at 8am on Saturday morning, and didn’t leave till 5pm on Monday afternoon. Sometimes I’d get a few hours sleep here and there, sometimes I wouldn’t sleep at all. This was back in the early 1990s. Things have changed since then, and I believe it’s mostly shifts now. But I was there, so I think I’m well placed to say what happened!

I never said that made me a good doctor though - not sure where you got that from. But it certainly required a degree of resilience and cerebral functioning to still be able to make decisions with that level of exhaustion.

It was bloody awful though, and not something I’d recommend.

@TizerorFizz where did you get 96 hours from?

The 50-hour-non-stop working was not an official contracted shift, but being at work from Saturday morning till Monday 5pm was normal, and a requirement every 4 weeks in most junior doctor jobs in the early 1990s. Being “on call” at a weekend meant that, of course, if there were no unwell patients, the doctor could sit around doing nothing. But that never happened. Where I worked there was an A&E so there was a constant stream of new admissions, who were often very unwell, as well as GP admissions.

I’m not sure why you don’t believe me.

@TizerorFizz were you a junior doctor in the early 1990s? Trust me, it was done, and regularly. And it was unofficially expected too. I remember as a paediatric junior doctor I’d started work at 9am one morning, been on call all night with no sleep (paediatrics was crazy in the winter months), and worked until 5pm the following day. I was carrying the “crash bleep” - the pager that went off for cardiac arrests - which could never be abandoned, and had to be physically handed over to the next doctor taking over on call. The doctor who was due to be on call the following night called in sick. HR spent the day trying to find a locum, but couldn’t, so at 5pm they told me I’d have to stay and do another night on call. There was no option. This was how it was.

Yes I remember ,I qualified as a nurse in 1996
I remember Drs being in csall.overnight ,and working the next morning from 9 am
I also remember it was worse at weekends ,when they were expected to.work all.week and be in call from 4pm, Friday until Monday morning.

… is it that intelligent to sign up to these conditions?! 😅

😂 good point! We were young and idealistic!!

Junior doctors didn't get a choice it was either get on with it or get a different job.
The idea was that the consultant had done those hours so the juniors should

Indeed Lammy thinks men can grow a cervix. And his boss, has a law degree too. HE think women can have penises. And these 2 men are running our country apparently. What IS intelligence..

On paper I'm highly intelligent. I got into Cambridge from a state school, got the fully funded PhD (which I couldn't have paid for), and for whatever IQ is worth, I score highly. But there are areas in which I am genuinely a borderline idiot. Someone upthread mentioned how their DH couldn't pack a car boot - that's me. Real example - I was getting a cat flap put in a window because I live in a ground floor flat without an external door. So I indicate where the flap is going to go, and its a window you open at the bottom and push outwards and the flap was going in near the base of the window so the cats could access it. And then I suddenly thought - "wait, couldn't someone just reach through and unlock the window?" I was stumped. I truly couldn't see a way around this. The workman looks at me, looks at the window, and says....

"I'll put the lock at the top".

This was a completely obvious solution. But I have no problem admitting that I'm very smart in some ways and pretty dumb in others. And I always ask if I don't understand something. I've only ever met maybe 2 people I would describe as actual geniuses, and they tend to be people who are sort of holistically brilliant. One was both a theoretical physicist and a wildly accomplished musician/ orchestral leader. Nice guy too, if a bit blunt.

Sorry to have perhaps offended some people with law degrees. My experience of them is second and third hand having dated and hung out with the peers of a 2nd and 3rd year law student. Also at a slightly later date having googled myself down a rabbithole of what such a degree entailed.
David Lammy says some astonishingly ignorant things, such as that men can grow a cervix after some procedures and drugs. He does seem to have a bit of a foot in mouth issue on other subjects including his foreign office brief.
To be fair Boris said some similarly astonishing/horrifying things in the same role, and apparently he is also everso intelligent.

Based on my experience at a uni with a high proportion of private school students - I'd agree that they weren't any more intelligent or academic than us state school students (in some cases they were IMO positively dim)

For me the difference lay in their unwavering confidence, self belief and also the opportunities they'd had - I remember my first politics seminar and all the private school students were just casually dropping in that they'd done public speaking in ridiculously prestigious circumstances. One had also worked for Obama 😳. And they all just spoke so confidently.

As a state school dropout pre-GCSE (put myself through college in my early 20s) who already had imposter syndrome I was just sat there in amazement that these teens had done all this stuff! I still managed to win all the prizes and be in the 5% on the course to get a first though so no I really don't think private school necessarily helps academically 🤣

I don’t know if it’s changed now, but a few years ago when a relative was in medical school, medicine degree were not graded in the same way as other degrees (first, 2:1, 2:2 etc.), so one just needed to pass (40% pass mark) each year with the ability to resit. Said relative did just that - scraped through each year, resitting at least one exam each year. Now a doctor.

Lawyers and accountants used to need at least a 2:1 or above to get a trainee position, but that might have changed now too?

@WitchHag 'A first class degree is 70% - less than three quarters.'

That's really not how it works 😕 at least for non-STEM degrees (no idea how it works there!). Have you been to uni? I went to a very good uni (top ten overall and number one for my degree course) and scraped a first - only four of us out of a cohort of 80 got firsts and I know the highest final grade was 72%. I think the highest I got on coursework was 78% and that essay won a prize. The requirements for my degree at A level were AAA (pre A*). So do you think I and all my course mates are thick? I mean some were decidedly average but on the whole they were a pretty bright bunch!

It's not like a maths test or something where if you answer everything right you get 100%...

The percentage means nothing. How hard are the questions, and how complex a response are you supposed to give?

@Andoutcomethewolves When DH went he remembers 1 person getting a first in engineering. At some universities on some courses, it’s 40%. A first doesn’t mean as much now it’s 40%, not 4% or less. Like top grade A levels, grade inflation has eroded firsts too - not everywhere but in too many cases.

@TizerorFizz at least have the good grace to apologise to @SalfordQuays

There are lots of educated fools around. Those who can talk the talk!

The nss has caused this. On my course this year 18% got firsts which I think is high but about right compared to others in the same faculty. There is huge pressure to keep students happy for the stupid survey.

My DD got 12 x grade 9’s at GCSE (predicted 4 x A*s at A level) and I would say she is obviously intelligent but more than that, she puts the work in. No-one saw her straight 9’s coming in years 7-9, her attendance was under 80% in year 9 due to illness and covid on line learning probably put her back a fair bit. So I say sometimes you can be on average (maybe more) intelligence, but hard work pushes you to the top. If i’d have put the level of work into my GCSE and A levels, i’m sure i’d have done a lot better too (but not straight 9’s!)

DD achieved 89% in her first year, 58% in her second year with 50% attendance due to hospital admissions. She had been advised to withdraw and do her second year again. However other family members said no and just have a go at the exams. She is super smart (IQ 162) but blinking hard work and frequently a doubting Thomas. She's a wonderful writer and although it's not her chosen field of study I think it really helps her answer written questions and essays.
And yes I agree 40% is very low as a pass mark for medics. My DD is studying a clinical subject and without this would not have passed her stats module, however it brings down her overall grade.

There was an article on intelligence and occupations. Here is a summary of the article, written in plain English:

https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/how-intelligence-and-personality

It contains a link to the original research paper. It shows the IQ ranges for the top and bottom jobs, along with a discussion of personality factors (ability + effort). Apparently cognitive abilities in Western societies are mainly down to genetic differences, rather than parental environment.