Tell me about your aspiring medic DC now- did they end up pursuing another career?

dinomirror · 2024-06-17T20:07:06+00:00

I've posted on here quite a bit about Dd's A Level choices. Shes done a 180 and now wants to do Bio,Chem,psy instead of History,Politics ,econ with a focus of going into med. whilst i believe she is fortunate enough to do well at any A Level she wants to, i worry that shes wanting to do med for the prestige and because a lot of her peers also want to. Furthermore, i hear that more and more med students find med school unbearable. If you have a med student dc, do they enjoy it? Do they still want to be a doctor?

mumsneedwine · 17/06/2024 22:01

Pop over to the 2025 thread on higher education. Med school is great if you are ready for the hard work. Loads love it ! But medicine has no prestige, crap pay and awful opportunities, so know what you're getting into.

Mintearo7 · 26/06/2024 11:18

It does have prestige still. And also opportunities and pay, but outside the UK. I did bio, chem and psych with half a mind to do medicine. I could potentially have scraped in, but I would have had to work incredibly hard and was honest with myself from the start that I’m not going to absolutely exhaust myself for a career. I’m not built that way - I would encourage your DD to look deep inside and identify how’s she’s built and why she wants to do it. Medicine does suit some. I would say most of the people I know who did Medicine have a complex love/hate relationship with their career. I ended up doing Biology at a Russell Group and have had a successful career in a healthcare related field prob earning more than a lot of doctors. A lot of my fellow A-level and uni students had successful careers so that combination of subjects certainly doesn’t close doors but she does have to have a passion for the subjects.

mumsneedwine · 26/06/2024 12:17

Currently being a doctor is not great. Awful pay and conditions, facing unemployment after foundation years. Not enough jobs for the doctors we train. Weird but true. We also have unemployed fully trained GPs.

Please do your research and if still want to go for it that's great, but don't expect any prestige or to be paid well. Strikes are not for fun. £15.53 is the reality of a new doctor, even on Xmas day.

Original poster

dinomirror · 26/06/2024 14:04

Mintearo7 · 26/06/2024 11:18

It does have prestige still. And also opportunities and pay, but outside the UK. I did bio, chem and psych with half a mind to do medicine. I could potentially have scraped in, but I would have had to work incredibly hard and was honest with myself from the start that I’m not going to absolutely exhaust myself for a career. I’m not built that way - I would encourage your DD to look deep inside and identify how’s she’s built and why she wants to do it. Medicine does suit some. I would say most of the people I know who did Medicine have a complex love/hate relationship with their career. I ended up doing Biology at a Russell Group and have had a successful career in a healthcare related field prob earning more than a lot of doctors. A lot of my fellow A-level and uni students had successful careers so that combination of subjects certainly doesn’t close doors but she does have to have a passion for the subjects.

Purely out of interest,what do you do? Dd is now considering the same combo

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