New year new degree

Hi lovely IHDers
Its been ages and I apologise for my absence. Gregory has been well, he's finally nicely settled into his new kidney after lots of infections from Feb - August last year. Then the end of the year was a maelstrom of rushing about, and now its all on again because I've enrolled in a new undergraduate degree. :-) Craziness I know.

Here's the short of it: I graduated from the PhD last September, but I actually finished writing it last February, and I started looking for work before that, so its actually been 18 months trying to crack into academia with a social sciences phd to no avail. I went to various professors looking for homely advice, and the general picture is that to make that step into permanent tenure I need to spend about five years as a casual, and probably also go overseas also. Casual work in academia is poorly paid and you spend about a quarter of the year unemployed. I know people who got prizes for their honours and or phds but never got past that casual work divide after five years. I applied for lecturing jobs, I applied for postdoctoral fellowships, I put together two applications for federal funding with lots of support from agencies and univerisities, but I was recently advised that funding these days is only attainable by established researchers. Funding opportunities for new researchers seems to be drying up, especially if you are not in the hard sciences, which I am not. I have a lot more publications than most of my fellow phd graduates, the field is so competitive these days that I need to have written a book and started a second one to be a serious candidate. To do that, people are expected to write for free in their spare time and find casual work teaching in the interim. I was interviewed for postdoctoral positions but didn't get the job. I didn't even get a reply for the lecturing positions. There are a few positions in each country for people in my field, and the ones in Australia won't be vacant for quite a few years. It all got very disheartening. I didn't want to move Gregory while his transplant was new, nor did I want to move him for the sake of a year spent here or there overseas, and I also don't want to move away from him. So I started wondering about other careers.

I noticed that I could spend five years studying medicine, after which I would be very likely to get work in rural Australia, relatively close to Gregory's hospital, and rewarding (emotionally, humantiarianly if that's a word) work, and also well paid work (like much better paid than academic work) (by which I mean more than double the pay of academic work) and I could also then return to research, which I love doing, but from the position of well paid part time work rather than poorly paid casual work. Plus, instead of preaching to doctors about how to be good communicators, maybe I should try just doing it myself.

So... I'm trying to get into medicine: the degree is called Doctor of Medicine at University of Sydney, for graduate entry you need to do a difficult entrance exam called GAMSAT, and then if they are interested they'll interview you and consider their options. I did GAMSAT in March, results come out in May. I'm presently enrolled in a Bachelor of Medical Science, so that if I do get into medicine next year it won't be so hard, and if I don't I'll have a better chance at GAMSAT next year. Of course I'll be interested in renal medicine, and as a craftswoman I'm curious about surgery (I'm great at hand sewing), but I'm hoping to specialise in General Practice (that really is a specialty) and live in the country. :-)

Medical Science is amazing!!! The body is amazing, chemistry is amazing, biology knocks my socks off, its all an incredible adventure and I'm loving every minute of it. Fingers crossed I got through GAMSAT but it was really hard, and I didn't study Biology or Chemistry in highschool so if I got in it will be a minor miracle and testimony to some serious cramming from Jan-Mar this year! Sometimes I get sad about my PhD because I loved my research and I had a really good funding proposal ready to go, which I couldn't get funded. I think one day I can bring the two aspects together, and start thinking again about patient's experiences of healthcare. By then I'll be within the medical profession instead of an outsider. Maybe I can get more done that way? I'm pretty determined not to become 'one of them' but to remember all that I have learnt about the point of view of patients and their families trying to get by within the medical system.

And hopefully one day I will be able to get a non-casual job ;-)

Smooches to all IHDers.