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 thread seems to be conflating a lot of different things - intelligence, knowledge, exam techniques, financial success - and making lots of generalisations about them and how they’re connected.

Do you need intelligence to start a MN thread?….I think I know the answer

It's very counterproductive when people say privilege and connections are more important than smarts. All of the people I know through work who are very successful have made it without that. When I look at my own family - both my grandparents were as working class as you can get from the north of England - all their grandchildren have got into top public schools, some with scholarships, building great careers, one got an MBE at age 23. Even though the parents were driven to alcoholism due to the pressure (partly) their parents put them under to work/succeed and being sometimes neglective parents. I think there is huge social mobility in this country. It's such a lame excuse to say "I'm born disadvantaged, I'm staying that way". If you are born with certain characteristics such as intelligence and willingness to work extremely hard, it's largely choice.

Do you know what you don’t know?

… I think I know the answer.

I think the thread is referring to an old fashioned idea of intelligence, which is to say not merely knowing a lot of facts and figures but being able to apply this knowledge to real life situations, and think of theories and innovations. Take Tolkein, he didn’t just know a lot of languages, he could apply his knowledge to his fiction and create his own languages based on his very good understanding of the roots and origins of different linguistic family trees.
That isn’t to say he was emotionally intelligent or street smart, I have no idea if he was practical or good at maths; but he clearly was intelligent.

What an utterly simplistic post…..
Yawn

DD has a first in a STEM subject from a good uni, and was called thick as 2 short planks for training to be a teacher. As if life and intelligence are about what you can earn.

I'm a lawyer, and I also mark for law schools, and I think the answer is "it depends". But I also think there's a higher general standard of intelligence in the sector.
I think basically anyone can actually pass a law degree with a bit of study. And people who aren't naturally bright (IQ wise) can do extremely well in law (study and career) if they are motivated hard workers- better than the many of us who are gifted but with ADHD tendencies.
But grad law jobs are extremely competitive and so on the other side of it, if you don't have good grades and can't compensate for it through another skill (eg excellent people skills, brilliant attention to detail) or family connection then you will struggle to get a foot in the door.
There are also a lot of areas of law where natural smarts aren't the prevailing job requirement (a lot of the transactional sectors eg) But most advocacy based roles (traditional lawyering) require you to be able to analyse a significant amount of information from someone's real, messy, normal life, use it to create a convincing narrative or evidence your argument, account for all the relevant legal considerations and very often, do all that on the fly as your opponent argues otherwise and the judge brings up other issues. I think people who do this successfully usually are what we traditionally consider to be quite smart.

Agreed. I know some stellar opera singers, for instance. Some wanted a particular type of career, singing roles, enough to deal with the constant travelling and insecurity, while others, equally talented, didn’t, so chose to sing in the (stellar) ROH chorus, because they chose security, regular work and living in one place. I used to assume that all the best singers wanted to be Jonas Kauffman or Elina Garanca when I knew nothing about the opera world, but it just isn’t true. The same holds true for many professions. The most ‘obvious’ measures of success may just indicate different priorities, not a lack of inherent abilities.

And to pick up on academia — absolutely not the case that an Oxford academic is cleverer than one at the University of Hull. I used to lecture at Oxford, but I left for more senior job at another university which didn’t have the peculiarities of the Oxford college/faculty split, and which paid better. Like many people. Others have hung on at Oxford for years on fixed-term contracts. Neither set is cleverer.

Yes I guess you'd need a base level of intelligence but I wouldn't describe the people who are the most successful and paid the highest in my field as the most intelligent. You only have to watch two professors try and set up a hybrid meeting to realise their problem solving ability is atrocious.

I worked with a qualified accountant who passed all the difficult exams but in reality he didn't understand accounting and struggled in an accountants role. I guess he was book smart, but that wasn't enough.

Absolutely connections. I saw it in the NHS where medics knew each others families. The connections help with getting work experience and interviews- you could walk in knowing your interviewer.
Years ago saw a medic whose father was a consultant. Told strings had been pulled, he was awful. Same with other professions.

I've had a 25 year investment banking career. I pretty much failed my A-levels (I got a D in Biology and General Studies, failed maths and chemistry). I did scrape enough points to get into an ex polytechnic to read economics, which I developed a passion for and got a 2:1.

I'm not 'book smart' but I do understand financial markets and have a real talent for sales. There are two types of people in IB. The super smart, maths, quant types, who can build the most incredible financial models and put really complex deals together. Most of these people, are genius level clever, but you can't put them in front of clients, they speak a completely different 'language' and often don't want to speak to clients anyway. They get their job satisfaction from finding mathematical solutions to complicated problems.

Then there are the sales types, who have an ability to build relationships, understand the fundamental problem the client is trying to fix and can take the complicated modelling the quants do, and explain the deal in simple terms the client can understand. We definitely need both types of people in IB, but the sales people aren't necessarily very intelligent. We've recruited blind for many years now, so the interviewer won't see which school/uni candidates have attended. In 25 years I only know of one junior who got a job because his dad worked at the same bank - he was very good at his job however and would have had a successful career wherever he ended up.

For me there is different intelligence. I like the phrase if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will always think it’s stupid.

I know some very academic intellectuals but they have no common sense. Social skills are sometimes lacking too.

I read once that high level managers are more likely to be sociopaths as they have to have a lack of empathy at times to make those hard decisions.

I don’t believe all doctors are intelligent, some are naturally gifted and some just worked very hard and had a good background to help boost them. The people I trust most are from poorer backgrounds who really wanted it, focus and driven.

I also believe there some very intelligent people who would never be labelled as that due to not flourishing in a standard test defined by society

Where/when were you doing the LPC? When I did it the vast majority already had their training contracts and their future firms were paying. I reckon only about 20% funded their own. Are you saying 1 in 8 from the self-funders?

I think connections (and private education) gives people the confidence to try and the assumption it will happen for then- and this is largely why highly connected people are so over represented. Lots of equally smart or much smarter people think they are not smart enough to try, and noone in their life tries to convince them otherwise.
I also think in law it's really dependent where you're going as to how far those connections go, though. If you want to work at a top tier corporate firm, they help a lot. If you want to work in the legal assistance (legal aid, CLC) space, you're running shoulders with a lot of people who were middle class university socialists. In migration and family law boutique practice, lots of first and second generation migrants servicing their specific communities.

I'm an academic (sociologist). You don't have to be a genius to get a PhD. You need to be reasonably intelligent, self-disciplined, hardworking, organized, and hungry to learn. I did used to think medical doctors were extremely intelligent until I had the misfortune to work with a psychiatrist who was so unbelievably confident in his misunderstanding of statistics and probabilty I can only hope he didn't make prescription decisions based on it. And you know what, statistics are hard. Plenty of intelligent people don't understand statistics, probability, and especially how probabilty relates to individuals. I understand them (to an extent) because I've been trained to. But absolute confidence in your correctness about something that you do not understand is stupid.

I later learned that poor understanding of probabilty is a recognised issue/gap in training in medicine.

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’m always so confused by this sort of thought process. I’m often blown away by films with amazing plot/direction/cinematography/AI etc, or tv stuff with thrilling stories/plots. Or, certain music, or art. I could never do this stuff. No way could I ever be the next George Lucas/James Cameron/Peter Jackson. No way am I ever going to create virtual mastery. No way am I ever going to draw anything better than a stick figure, and I’m virtually tone deaf so hardly going to be the next Monet, Renoir, Beethoven or Nirvana/Dave Grohl. Yet, I’m in one of the professions named. Does that mean I’m intelligent yet none of these other people are? I don’t believe so, just that intelligence is not a trait as OP and many others are describing and I query what ‘smart’ means. I am great in certain things, but again, even my stick figure people are hard to decipher, so am I smart or not?

I don't think you need to be intelligent. You need opportunity and the right aptitude. If your personality means you are interested in learning you will stick at it, learn more and become educated. I think most have the potential to be in these professions but only some go through with it.

I'm a doctor OP. I don't think you need to be Mensa level intelligence by any means. I reckon you could teach a smart 12 year old most of the Scientific knowledge that's required. However what really makes it a challenging is 1) The sheer volume of knowledge that is needed 2) combining this with clinical skills and problem solving 3)combining this with interpersonal skills in order to lead in a situation and maintain a trusting relationship with both patients and the rest of your team 4) Having the common sense to recognise and manage risk on multiple levels 5) having the emotional maturity to manage severe levels of stress. IMO no you don't need to be einstein to be capable of doing this but you do need to be quite a special kind of person to have the thinking skills required especially as a fresh faced barely-adult who's only just finished Uni. An exceptionally high IQ might even be a detriment if you lack the other necessary skills. Would you want Sheldon Cooper to be your GP, for example?

I'm an accountant. It's a bit of a misnomer that you have to be good at maths. You do have to like numbers though, so the two do generally go hand in hand as you're more likely to "like" numbers if you're good at maths.

For the bulk of work accountants do (I've been in general practice with smaller firms for almost 30 years), the most complicated maths you'll use is percentages.

I'm a successful business owner and like to think I'm a very good accountant. I did well at school, but not amazingly compared to my peers (it was a selective grammar school) - I got B, C and E at A-levels, for instance (the C was maths!), but mostly A* to B for GCSEs. I was very much an average student at a very good school.

Up until very recently, out of 17 people in my firm, only 1 person had a university degree (and that wasn't me!).

Of course not everyone can pass a law degree with a bit of study
Why do you think there are thousands of kids struggling to get through their maths and English?
It comes down to a lot more than a bit of a study .

Not that unusual IME! We employed someone that was the one person I refer to in my previous post that was the only person in the firm with a degree. In fact, he had 4! He also studied for the accountancy exams off his own back and passed them all first time.

On paper, therefore, he is a highly intelligent individual.

Unfortunately he was hopeless at the actual job! As is often the case, the professional exams go way and above what you actually do on a day to day basis and while being able to master the highly technical bits he'd rarely ever use, he wasn't very good at the basic principles.

I understand where you’re coming from but disagree. Take law (the area I know), to get an opportunity at the vast majority of the National and International and certainly, SS to US elite firms you will have to undertake a technical test, in addition to (for some firms) verbal and numerical reasoning.

Firms are also getting much at contextual recruitment (particularly for training schemes). I’m not saying nepotism doesn’t exist but you have to be intelligent enough to pass the technical aspects of the recruitment process.

I think just as important as intellectual intelligence is social intelligence. I'm ND and spent the majority of my career unwittingly losing at the politics game as I couldn't work it out. This was at great cost to my career and I struggled to get promoted despite having a wealth of experience. I'm better now and caught up slightly but only because I was lucky enough to get a job in an organisation that isn't particularly hot on office politics. Those backstabby, brown-nosey type organisations I was in before i had no chance.