The hours are still lousy, but for James Lozada, a former reporter at Las Vegas ABC affiliate KTNV, the satisfaction of being a doctor is light years ahead of his time in TV news. “I found that sensational stories were favored over thought-provoking ones,” he told Kiplinger’s Pat Mertz Esswein. “I couldn’t see myself covering fires, murders and accidents decade after decade.”
Lozada, who’d often covered health stories, decided to leave Las Vegas in 2006. He went home to Texas and applied to med schools all over the country before landing at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, in Greensburg, Pa., near Pittsburgh. “I found that osteopathic schools are sometimes more accepting of applicants with nontraditional backgrounds such as mine. I graduated at the top of my class.”
Lozada’s saddled with the debt of his medical education–over $200,000–but he’s still confident he made the right career move to leave TV:
It’s…a very unstable gig, requiring you to move frequently to excel. When I left in 2006, the news environment was changing from traditional to new media, and it seemed like an uncertain time for journalism. Reporters around me were getting fired, and I wanted more stability.