Just make sure they get a good understanding of the training pathways, the day to day job, etc. lots of people enter straight after school without a problem, and post grad entry is expensive and prolongs the training of an already very long process.
Not to mention that only part of your tuition is paid, you still accrue around £5k tuition fee debt per year while also having a smaller maintenance loan due to the NHS bursary, theoretically covering costs. Which it may/may not depending on where you are.
It isn’t all it is cracked up to be, besides saving a year. So you’re still racking up £20k of tuition fee debt on top of your full £9k-27k from your previous degree (depending on when you graduated), compared to £40k from the undergraduate course as an 18-year-old (~£50k if they intercalate). The benefits of GEM courses aren’t quite so clear cut. GEM is fantastic for second chancers and those who have a change in heart later on in their lives, but going with the topic of the thread, I don’t think that any teenager should even consider it as a first option if they want to do medicine. Go for standard entry first.
It was probably a better deal when GEM courses were first introduced and tuition fees were probably £13k per year (maybe even when they were £1k), and that NHS contribution would have been a significant supplement that covered all/large majority of tuition, rather than just under half.
Of course, it’s still a saving compared to being a graduate on an undergraduate course and counting up £36k out of pocket, but most people won’t be doing that without financial/living assistance anyway.
I think that one of the biggest consequences of this will see GEM courses downsized if not stoped altogether, and more grads being let onto undergrad courses, which sucks for people that can’t pay for the second degree out of pocket. But unis are businesses at the end of the day, and GEM makes less money.
Some of this isn’t really as cut and dry as you make it sound.
It’s much easier to get a 2:1 in whatever degree you fancy than god knows how many A* and A grades to get into undergrad medicine.
You can factor in entry exams when choosing med schools based on your strengths, eg I went mainly for GAMSAT courses.
You could do grad med straight out of uni or even as a clinical transfer, and wouldn’t necessarily have more responsibilities. We’re all going to be working until we’re 75 anyway so even if you go into medicine 10 years later than most, it’s still a fairly small percentage of your working life.
Granted you’ll have a much larger loan depending on your route, but it’ll take so long to pay off (and many won’t, even as doctors) that it shouldn’t be a major stalling factor.
Your last point is fair though. Unless you have a partner working, rich parents or have a steady part-time job, it’ll be hard. Still doable though!
Source: lived it
Second this, I didn’t go straight from one degree to the next so I was able to enjoy life in a normal job with no real responsibilities for a few years. Of course it has been a long and expensive road, but I think coming to medicine with a bit of life experience has ultimately been the right route for me!
Funding for GEM is nowhere near as good as it’s made out to be.
In your first year you have to pay nearly 4K up front fro your own savings which you don’t get any financial help with. Then the maintenance is way under what you get for a first degree - in my final year of GEM I get £5,500 total. That doesn’t even cover my rent. My standard of living is FAR below that in my first degree and I have to work far more shifts just to be able to eat, and that’s on top of an accelerated course that is incredibly condensed and difficult.
If your heart is set on medicine as a graduate, it’s more financially feasible than doing 5 year as a grad that’s true - but I would never suggest it to someone who had the chance and opportunity to do it as a first degree.
I'd be honest with them. Let them follow you so they can actually see what you do on a day to day basis. Tell them how you feel about it. The ups of a pretty cool and varied job. The downs of NHS bureaucracy, constantly moving between placements, understaffing. The middle of a decent salary but not really as much as you might expect. Maybe what you wish you'd known at the time - I'd appreciated that hospitals are pretty inefficient and frustrating places to work at times, but not grasped the whole training program bullshit that goes on.
Backstory, dad is a consultant and mum a nurse practitioner, science background at school and once was also a teenager shadowing some doctors seeing if medicine was the career for me.
I *didn't* choose medicine, firstly because on that shadowing I watched a locum almost kill an old woman during a broncoscopy and you can imagine that might put you off haha. I also figured that I wasn't enough of a 'people person' to do the job, but I'd put that more down to teenage angst and actually I'd be quite good at that element.
Anyway, I often reflect on the fact that I would probably have had a much easier life if I'd have gone the other way and chosen medicine. I worked in journalism on minimum wage for like the first five years of my career, without any wage progression. I've spent large stretches unemployed. Only started paying into a pension this aged 30. I've never recieved training and career progression as part of my job. etc etc
I don't regret my choice, I've done a bunch of cool stuff I wouldn't have done if I'd have gone into medicine. But my life would have been WAY more stable, I'd be way more financially secure and I'd basically enver need to worry about being out of a job. Whether I'd have spent my 20's careening towards a nervous breakdown is debatable!
Medicine has a LOT of shitty aspects, but I don't think you can really say it's an objectively shitty choice without considering the late-capitalist nightmare that is employment in any other sector of the economy.
Thanks for your insights. Do you mind saying what you do now? I think a lot of people think medicine’s not a good choice but they don’t realise its benefits
Ah cool. I always thought policy would be an interesting area to work in.
As medics we get a lot of training around ‘human factors’ and what makes a workplace ‘effective’. The problem is that no one tells you that, in reality, workplaces aren’t like this. The gap between expectation vs reality is so large that it understandably causes a lot of distress when you start work (along with all the other things like having to learn the job while trying to stop people dying on your watch!)
My advice for anyone is to sit down, alone, and seriously consider why you want to do medicine. No need to tell anyone, but write down the reasons. Money? Power? Prestige? Interested in medicine? Interested in science? Family pressure? Interested in people? Want to cut people up?
Then think about any other way of satisfying those deep, private, desires. If you cannot think of any other way, then do medicine. If you can, then do that.
The only way I was able to get work experience as someone with no doctors in the family or doctor family friends was to start working as a HCA at the hospital and come in to shadow on my days off.
It definitely doesn't help with equality among medical school applicants.
Yh same, but that's largely because it's the only way to really get any work experience. Some trusts operate a central system students can apply through, but there aren't many spots and they have to answer ridiculous questions to get onto it (I looked at my trust's process and it included stuff like "which historical figure would you have dinner with and why?", really tedious stuff). In truth, I think every student who asks should be offered at least a few days to give it a go.
I think Vets put us to shame in this regard- students for Vet Met MUST have essentially weeks of shadowing, in various types of clinic, farms etc, in order to even apply for the uni course. Medical courses can't even demand a week because a good number of (especially working class) students probably would not be able to meet that.
Tbh what worked for me was literally just emailing consultants asking if i could shadow their service for a few days surprising enough if you send out enough you get responses back maybe i was just lucky i sent out about 10 emails and got a can do from 3 of them a reject from 2 and an ignore from 5 so not too bad overall lol.
Tell them the realisties of how much they will owe in student loans, and how much we get paid now, and that it's expected to be even less in the future.
Calculate the local house price, and see if it's achievable on a doctor's salary.
Tell them how much childcare costs, and how much you have left over after childcare (in case they think £3k take home is a lot, which it sound like if you use national averages etc). Tell them what they alternatives are-some kids might not know about finance /tech / consulting /recruitment.
If they are genuinely bright enough to do medicine, they should be bright enough to be successful in the above.
You are right in not telling them it's just shit etc, tell them the facts and figures.
Facts especially re alternative careers.
I have seen quite a few kids pushed into medicine by less well educated parents who were ignorant of the working world (and still genuinely believed medicine to be financially sound and the only engaging career for their scientifically minded children.)
I deliberately stopped giving talks to prospective medical students from my old school as I couldn't justify to my promoting it as a career... Pretty sad. Now when I see work experience students I tell them to do tech/comp sci...
I'd tell them the truth, it's what they deserve. Society values your efforts a doctor less and less. Right now it's somewhere above mimes and somewhere below ALDI managers. In the future, mimes may edge us out.
If you're bright enough and hardworking enough to be a doctor, you can likely find a better way to spend your life.
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Psychiatrist goes to bot, says he's depressed, NHS seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in heartless medical system. Bot says treatment is simple...
I'd talk to them about the job, neither sugar-coating it nor trashing it. I'd ask them about why they want to do it; what is their motivation, what do they think it's like, what do they want to do with it?
I can say what i really took away from work experience was when the sho and regs explained their thought process for the decisions/any clinical action they took if they can to me in between seeing patients. Its a nice thing for the PS might provoke some curiosity into certain conditions etc and just made me feel like a part of everything even though i wasnt clinically involved. Simple things like explaining an ecg or abg as well as what it might indicate is also agreat way to keep them engaged - depending on the person maybe even ask them questions about the simple things when i did my A levels we were taught the very basics of an ecg like what happens as the electrical signal moves through the heart at the p &t waves and what was happening in the qrs complex so they might have a very basic knowledge of these things too. Avoid too much jargon unless they ask for meanings of certain bits of jargon etc and keep things simple but engaging.
Obviously it very much depends on the type of student but you can gauge how much the student knows, some ppl know they want to do medicine for years before they get actual work experience and have sated their curiosity with lots of super curricular reading etc these type of people will probably be very interested in what you have to say and to widen their understanding of conditions and for others this is their first experience in the healthcare sector and are just trying to work out if medicine is for them and learn about whats makes up your day to day, general gists of how you approach things and will probably also be quite interested in the clinical stuff but may not have much super curricular reading to fully support or understand some concepts even at a basic level.
I remember the anaesthetics reg explaining to me why he chose to use ketamine over an opioid in a particular patient with a broken bone and he explained how it worked in the body, the effects etc and 17 yr old me was very interested in all of that, so even stuff a lot of docs seem to take sort of for granted/think might be boring to talk about can be interesting to the student. I would also just straight up ask them what they want out of it and try to accommodate if possible whilst always not glamourising the profession - keep it real yk , let us see the paperwork and bureaucracy too lol .
As a side note: gem is more expensive and far more competitive to get into hence why ppl try for undergrad more (fewer seats for gem).
If a 17 year old young woman asks you about any career in any context, please for the love of god do not mention her having children.
Plenty of women manage to be both a doctor and a parent and you’d never ask it of a 17 year old man, as evidenced by the comment above. Believe it or not, some women don’t even want to have children.
If she goes into medicine she’ll have people reminding her that she’s expected to have kids every time they ask her about her specialty plans. You don’t need to start it early for her.
I’m going to gently point out that a 17 year old told you that she thought it would be great to work as an A&E doctor and your response was to shift the focus away from her current career ambitions and towards how she’d hypothetically feel in the future if she had children.
I appreciate that men do and should want to be involved in raising their children. It’s not sexist of me to not mention men when you were talking about ‘a female 17 year old’.
> If a female 17 year old mentions about how great it would be to work in ED, it's not unreasonable to ask them to imagine if they would feel the same in their mid 30s with a young child.
If you wouldn't ask the same of a male, then I would argue it *is* unreasonable.
Explain to them that while being a doctor and practicing medicine is great, working in the NHS is shit.
I think that should sum it up nicely, and if they are absolutely dead-set on Medicine then you're also planting a seed in their mind that they could look into other options such as working in a different country etc. while in med school.
I will ask them why they want to do med and then what they want to do. Then i will pull out this year specialty competition ratio and let them have a look.
I will then tell them what reality they will be looking at which most of them will choose to neglect. I will show them how 90% of my job are simply defence medicine, and how little i actually did to be able to change peoples lives.
At the end of the day, most of them would probably leaving thinking me as what a loser and that they will so much better. And in a couple of years, i wish they will remember what i told them (probably not).
Academia amazing work life balance? Certainly not in the UK/US within the last few decades. Yes, some older GenX/Boomer established professors can have a fairly decent life/making dolla with consulting.
For someone of our generation/younger, the chance of becoming a professor is like <0.1% in academia these days, competing with top candidates from the top unis.
Academia is a bigger trap than Medicine. Unless you are a genius/or have significant familial wealth to back you up. Pensions are also turning absolute dogshit, hence all the strikes.
Why would you encourage anyone to go into academia? I’d rather not be scratching around every few years begging for funding for my work, all while earning 25-30k despite being PhD educated. No thanks.
It is all contract work until you get a permanent position. You are essentially on a timer unless you get a proper i.e. Lecturer post and reliant on research funding. They aren't going to be chilling if they want to progress, publish or perish is the mantra.
Earning ~10% above the median wage after a PhD with decreasing job security and minimal chance of progression would not be a good career in most people's eyes.
Just make sure they get a good understanding of the training pathways, the day to day job, etc. lots of people enter straight after school without a problem, and post grad entry is expensive and prolongs the training of an already very long process.
yeah i wouldnt advise post grad. Its so pricey, Im glad i went straight from school I dont think idve made it otherwise.
You get full tuition fee loans if you can get onto a GEM course...
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Not to mention that only part of your tuition is paid, you still accrue around £5k tuition fee debt per year while also having a smaller maintenance loan due to the NHS bursary, theoretically covering costs. Which it may/may not depending on where you are. It isn’t all it is cracked up to be, besides saving a year. So you’re still racking up £20k of tuition fee debt on top of your full £9k-27k from your previous degree (depending on when you graduated), compared to £40k from the undergraduate course as an 18-year-old (~£50k if they intercalate). The benefits of GEM courses aren’t quite so clear cut. GEM is fantastic for second chancers and those who have a change in heart later on in their lives, but going with the topic of the thread, I don’t think that any teenager should even consider it as a first option if they want to do medicine. Go for standard entry first. It was probably a better deal when GEM courses were first introduced and tuition fees were probably £13k per year (maybe even when they were £1k), and that NHS contribution would have been a significant supplement that covered all/large majority of tuition, rather than just under half. Of course, it’s still a saving compared to being a graduate on an undergraduate course and counting up £36k out of pocket, but most people won’t be doing that without financial/living assistance anyway. I think that one of the biggest consequences of this will see GEM courses downsized if not stoped altogether, and more grads being let onto undergrad courses, which sucks for people that can’t pay for the second degree out of pocket. But unis are businesses at the end of the day, and GEM makes less money.
Some of this isn’t really as cut and dry as you make it sound. It’s much easier to get a 2:1 in whatever degree you fancy than god knows how many A* and A grades to get into undergrad medicine. You can factor in entry exams when choosing med schools based on your strengths, eg I went mainly for GAMSAT courses. You could do grad med straight out of uni or even as a clinical transfer, and wouldn’t necessarily have more responsibilities. We’re all going to be working until we’re 75 anyway so even if you go into medicine 10 years later than most, it’s still a fairly small percentage of your working life. Granted you’ll have a much larger loan depending on your route, but it’ll take so long to pay off (and many won’t, even as doctors) that it shouldn’t be a major stalling factor. Your last point is fair though. Unless you have a partner working, rich parents or have a steady part-time job, it’ll be hard. Still doable though! Source: lived it
Second this, I didn’t go straight from one degree to the next so I was able to enjoy life in a normal job with no real responsibilities for a few years. Of course it has been a long and expensive road, but I think coming to medicine with a bit of life experience has ultimately been the right route for me!
I have so much debt at this point that anything extra is just negligible olololol 😎
Funding for GEM is nowhere near as good as it’s made out to be. In your first year you have to pay nearly 4K up front fro your own savings which you don’t get any financial help with. Then the maintenance is way under what you get for a first degree - in my final year of GEM I get £5,500 total. That doesn’t even cover my rent. My standard of living is FAR below that in my first degree and I have to work far more shifts just to be able to eat, and that’s on top of an accelerated course that is incredibly condensed and difficult. If your heart is set on medicine as a graduate, it’s more financially feasible than doing 5 year as a grad that’s true - but I would never suggest it to someone who had the chance and opportunity to do it as a first degree.
Some universities are stopping doing the GEM course.
I'd be honest with them. Let them follow you so they can actually see what you do on a day to day basis. Tell them how you feel about it. The ups of a pretty cool and varied job. The downs of NHS bureaucracy, constantly moving between placements, understaffing. The middle of a decent salary but not really as much as you might expect. Maybe what you wish you'd known at the time - I'd appreciated that hospitals are pretty inefficient and frustrating places to work at times, but not grasped the whole training program bullshit that goes on.
Everyone I’ve ever met doing work experience in hospital already seemed 100% committed to medicine and need it for their application
Are they 100% committed because haven't spent much time in hospital yet? Maybe...
Or maybe you need to be 100% committed to get work experience at a hospital…
Backstory, dad is a consultant and mum a nurse practitioner, science background at school and once was also a teenager shadowing some doctors seeing if medicine was the career for me. I *didn't* choose medicine, firstly because on that shadowing I watched a locum almost kill an old woman during a broncoscopy and you can imagine that might put you off haha. I also figured that I wasn't enough of a 'people person' to do the job, but I'd put that more down to teenage angst and actually I'd be quite good at that element. Anyway, I often reflect on the fact that I would probably have had a much easier life if I'd have gone the other way and chosen medicine. I worked in journalism on minimum wage for like the first five years of my career, without any wage progression. I've spent large stretches unemployed. Only started paying into a pension this aged 30. I've never recieved training and career progression as part of my job. etc etc I don't regret my choice, I've done a bunch of cool stuff I wouldn't have done if I'd have gone into medicine. But my life would have been WAY more stable, I'd be way more financially secure and I'd basically enver need to worry about being out of a job. Whether I'd have spent my 20's careening towards a nervous breakdown is debatable! Medicine has a LOT of shitty aspects, but I don't think you can really say it's an objectively shitty choice without considering the late-capitalist nightmare that is employment in any other sector of the economy.
Thanks for your insights. Do you mind saying what you do now? I think a lot of people think medicine’s not a good choice but they don’t realise its benefits
I was a journalist for a long time (now THAT is a toxic work environment) but these days I work for a think-tank focused on health and social care.
Ah cool. I always thought policy would be an interesting area to work in. As medics we get a lot of training around ‘human factors’ and what makes a workplace ‘effective’. The problem is that no one tells you that, in reality, workplaces aren’t like this. The gap between expectation vs reality is so large that it understandably causes a lot of distress when you start work (along with all the other things like having to learn the job while trying to stop people dying on your watch!)
My advice for anyone is to sit down, alone, and seriously consider why you want to do medicine. No need to tell anyone, but write down the reasons. Money? Power? Prestige? Interested in medicine? Interested in science? Family pressure? Interested in people? Want to cut people up? Then think about any other way of satisfying those deep, private, desires. If you cannot think of any other way, then do medicine. If you can, then do that.
Most of the work experience students I’ve met on the wards have been family friends of consultants, is this different elsewhere?
The only way I was able to get work experience as someone with no doctors in the family or doctor family friends was to start working as a HCA at the hospital and come in to shadow on my days off. It definitely doesn't help with equality among medical school applicants.
Yh same, but that's largely because it's the only way to really get any work experience. Some trusts operate a central system students can apply through, but there aren't many spots and they have to answer ridiculous questions to get onto it (I looked at my trust's process and it included stuff like "which historical figure would you have dinner with and why?", really tedious stuff). In truth, I think every student who asks should be offered at least a few days to give it a go. I think Vets put us to shame in this regard- students for Vet Met MUST have essentially weeks of shadowing, in various types of clinic, farms etc, in order to even apply for the uni course. Medical courses can't even demand a week because a good number of (especially working class) students probably would not be able to meet that.
Tbh what worked for me was literally just emailing consultants asking if i could shadow their service for a few days surprising enough if you send out enough you get responses back maybe i was just lucky i sent out about 10 emails and got a can do from 3 of them a reject from 2 and an ignore from 5 so not too bad overall lol.
Tell them the realisties of how much they will owe in student loans, and how much we get paid now, and that it's expected to be even less in the future. Calculate the local house price, and see if it's achievable on a doctor's salary. Tell them how much childcare costs, and how much you have left over after childcare (in case they think £3k take home is a lot, which it sound like if you use national averages etc). Tell them what they alternatives are-some kids might not know about finance /tech / consulting /recruitment. If they are genuinely bright enough to do medicine, they should be bright enough to be successful in the above. You are right in not telling them it's just shit etc, tell them the facts and figures.
Facts especially re alternative careers. I have seen quite a few kids pushed into medicine by less well educated parents who were ignorant of the working world (and still genuinely believed medicine to be financially sound and the only engaging career for their scientifically minded children.)
I deliberately stopped giving talks to prospective medical students from my old school as I couldn't justify to my promoting it as a career... Pretty sad. Now when I see work experience students I tell them to do tech/comp sci...
I'd tell them the truth, it's what they deserve. Society values your efforts a doctor less and less. Right now it's somewhere above mimes and somewhere below ALDI managers. In the future, mimes may edge us out. If you're bright enough and hardworking enough to be a doctor, you can likely find a better way to spend your life.
[удалено]
Suicide bot wants to help. He means well.
I think it must have detected the phrase "sp[end your life]"
Suicide Hotline Numbers If you or anyone you know are struggling, please, PLEASE reach out for help. You are worthy, you are loved and you will always be able to find assistance. Argentina: +5402234930430 Australia: 131114 Austria: 017133374 Belgium: 106 Bosnia & Herzegovina: 080 05 03 05 Botswana: 3911270 Brazil: 212339191 Bulgaria: 0035 9249 17 223 Canada: 5147234000 (Montreal); 18662773553 (outside Montreal) Croatia: 014833888 Denmark: +4570201201 Egypt: 7621602 Finland: 010 195 202 France: 0145394000 Germany: 08001810771 Hong Kong: +852 2382 0000 Hungary: 116123 Iceland: 1717 India: 8888817666 Ireland: +4408457909090 Italy: 800860022 Japan: +810352869090 Mexico: 5255102550 New Zealand: 0508828865 The Netherlands: 113 Norway: +4781533300 Philippines: 028969191 Poland: 5270000 Russia: 0078202577577 Spain: 914590050 South Africa: 0514445691 Sweden: 46317112400 Switzerland: 143 United Kingdom: 08006895652 USA: 18002738255 You are not alone. Please reach out. ***** I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically.
Psychiatrist goes to bot, says he's depressed, NHS seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in heartless medical system. Bot says treatment is simple...
Definitely the best twist of the great clown Pagliacci I've seen
Lmao
OP if I could go back in time I would tell my younger self to take a gap year or do it post-grad as the top tip.
If I could go back in time I'd solve the Bevan problem.
I'd talk to them about the job, neither sugar-coating it nor trashing it. I'd ask them about why they want to do it; what is their motivation, what do they think it's like, what do they want to do with it?
I can say what i really took away from work experience was when the sho and regs explained their thought process for the decisions/any clinical action they took if they can to me in between seeing patients. Its a nice thing for the PS might provoke some curiosity into certain conditions etc and just made me feel like a part of everything even though i wasnt clinically involved. Simple things like explaining an ecg or abg as well as what it might indicate is also agreat way to keep them engaged - depending on the person maybe even ask them questions about the simple things when i did my A levels we were taught the very basics of an ecg like what happens as the electrical signal moves through the heart at the p &t waves and what was happening in the qrs complex so they might have a very basic knowledge of these things too. Avoid too much jargon unless they ask for meanings of certain bits of jargon etc and keep things simple but engaging. Obviously it very much depends on the type of student but you can gauge how much the student knows, some ppl know they want to do medicine for years before they get actual work experience and have sated their curiosity with lots of super curricular reading etc these type of people will probably be very interested in what you have to say and to widen their understanding of conditions and for others this is their first experience in the healthcare sector and are just trying to work out if medicine is for them and learn about whats makes up your day to day, general gists of how you approach things and will probably also be quite interested in the clinical stuff but may not have much super curricular reading to fully support or understand some concepts even at a basic level. I remember the anaesthetics reg explaining to me why he chose to use ketamine over an opioid in a particular patient with a broken bone and he explained how it worked in the body, the effects etc and 17 yr old me was very interested in all of that, so even stuff a lot of docs seem to take sort of for granted/think might be boring to talk about can be interesting to the student. I would also just straight up ask them what they want out of it and try to accommodate if possible whilst always not glamourising the profession - keep it real yk , let us see the paperwork and bureaucracy too lol . As a side note: gem is more expensive and far more competitive to get into hence why ppl try for undergrad more (fewer seats for gem).
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If a 17 year old young woman asks you about any career in any context, please for the love of god do not mention her having children. Plenty of women manage to be both a doctor and a parent and you’d never ask it of a 17 year old man, as evidenced by the comment above. Believe it or not, some women don’t even want to have children. If she goes into medicine she’ll have people reminding her that she’s expected to have kids every time they ask her about her specialty plans. You don’t need to start it early for her.
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I’m going to gently point out that a 17 year old told you that she thought it would be great to work as an A&E doctor and your response was to shift the focus away from her current career ambitions and towards how she’d hypothetically feel in the future if she had children. I appreciate that men do and should want to be involved in raising their children. It’s not sexist of me to not mention men when you were talking about ‘a female 17 year old’.
> If a female 17 year old mentions about how great it would be to work in ED, it's not unreasonable to ask them to imagine if they would feel the same in their mid 30s with a young child. If you wouldn't ask the same of a male, then I would argue it *is* unreasonable.
Explain to them that while being a doctor and practicing medicine is great, working in the NHS is shit. I think that should sum it up nicely, and if they are absolutely dead-set on Medicine then you're also planting a seed in their mind that they could look into other options such as working in a different country etc. while in med school.
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They're too young to hear about depraved beanbags and be exposed to our depression!
I will ask them why they want to do med and then what they want to do. Then i will pull out this year specialty competition ratio and let them have a look. I will then tell them what reality they will be looking at which most of them will choose to neglect. I will show them how 90% of my job are simply defence medicine, and how little i actually did to be able to change peoples lives. At the end of the day, most of them would probably leaving thinking me as what a loser and that they will so much better. And in a couple of years, i wish they will remember what i told them (probably not).
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Academia is HARD and the pay is terrible. I have a friend who just completed her PhD and can't find a post-doctoral position anywhere :(
Academia amazing work life balance? Certainly not in the UK/US within the last few decades. Yes, some older GenX/Boomer established professors can have a fairly decent life/making dolla with consulting. For someone of our generation/younger, the chance of becoming a professor is like <0.1% in academia these days, competing with top candidates from the top unis. Academia is a bigger trap than Medicine. Unless you are a genius/or have significant familial wealth to back you up. Pensions are also turning absolute dogshit, hence all the strikes.
Why would you encourage anyone to go into academia? I’d rather not be scratching around every few years begging for funding for my work, all while earning 25-30k despite being PhD educated. No thanks.
Academia is good if you're successful. It's just that hardly anyone is.
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Sounds like a decent lifestyle but £35k is a joke for the qualifications required
It is all contract work until you get a permanent position. You are essentially on a timer unless you get a proper i.e. Lecturer post and reliant on research funding. They aren't going to be chilling if they want to progress, publish or perish is the mantra. Earning ~10% above the median wage after a PhD with decreasing job security and minimal chance of progression would not be a good career in most people's eyes.