This is part of a series called ‘The secret life of…’, pulling back the curtain on professions you’ve always wanted to know more about. If you want to anonymously reveal all about your job, email money@telegraph.co.uk
I decided to be a doctor when I was 13 years old. There’s not a lot of jobs that are interesting, sociable and offer a decent wage – I thought that being a doctor was an attractive combination of all three.
Medical school was really difficult. In my first year, 30pc of my class failed. Some of those students passed the re-sit, but about 10 people didn’t and they were kicked off the course. There were 200 people in my year so that’s about 5pc who didn’t make it past the first year.
We had lectures all morning and classes in the afternoon. You’d also have a lot of learning to do in your own time. People tell you to treat medical school like a nine-to-five job but the reality is you have to do more work than that.
After two-and-a-half years of what we’d call pre-clinical learning, I started rotating around different hospitals in the area. My favourite specialty was paediatrics. One of the big benefits about child medicine is that kids tend to get better. Often, they go back to how they were beforehand. That’s much rarer in adult medicine.
After medical school, you graduate as a doctor and you start your two foundation years, known as F1 and F2. After six years of university and excelling throughout medical school, my salary as an F1 doctor was £28,000.
My hourly rate was £13.85. At the time, someone working at Costa was getting paid more than me. And I graduated with £60,000 of student loans.
I worried that it wasn’t worth it all the way through my foundation training, but I hoped things would get better.
After those two foundation years, you apply for training posts. There aren’t enough – thousands of doctors every year don’t get training posts. When I applied, there were four applicants for every place and it was one of the less competitive ones.
Some specialties, like radiology, have ten doctors applying for each available spot. Of the 40 people I did my second foundation year with, I know of only three who got training places.
Most of my friends who I was in medical school with left the UK and now work as doctors in Australia and New Zealand. Of the eight guys I lived with during medical school, only three of us are staying in the UK. Five people from my second foundation year (out of 40 of us in total) have gone to the same hospital in Melbourne.
I am now paid, after three years as a doctor, around £43,000. That’s for a normal working week of 40 hours, and I get paid more for working 48 hours a week, plus nights and weekends. My friend who works in New Zealand is paid about £70,000 a year, and I know that the salaries in Australia are better than the New Zealand ones.