Your career in medicine begins early, without much room for exploration. Deciding to become a doctor requires sacrifice, tenacity and diligence, all made at a relatively young age without a lot of context. Did your 16-year-old, Year 11 self know what med school would really be like? Not every career path will be identical, even though the pressure to fit into a certain box can feel insurmountable. Our Content Strategy Manager at eMedici, Dr Karanjot Lall, talks about how her diverse career experiences have enriched her personal and professional life. Here’s her advice:

1. Don’t believe everything people tell you.

From the day you apply for med school to the day you retire; people will always tell you what to think. How many hours you need to study to be ready for an exam, how to rank placement options so that you get your first choice, what course you must attend to get your fellowship, which summer studentship you simply must do to specialise in whatever it is. All such advice should be taken with a grain of salt. Your journey, experience and talents differ from others, just as they differ from you and any advice you are given is given from someone else's lived experiences and perspectives, not yours. 

I grew up in New Zealand and moved to Australia in 2018 as a registrar and was told that I wouldn’t get a job because I had an ethnic name, was an overseas graduate and wasn’t on the training network. This meant I would be “scraping” for leftover jobs. All these things were objectively true – but none of them meant I wasn’t going to get a job. Similarly, when I sat my Fellowship exams, I was repeatedly told that I hadn’t studied for long enough. Months before the exam I was told I didn’t “look stressed enough” to pass (I still don’t understand what that means!). I was grateful to pass my exams but if I had listened to the projections others had thrown onto me, it may well have turned out differently. Only I knew what I was capable of. 

You will feel this too. You will hear people telling you what you “should” do, or what you can or cannot do. People who barely know you, or don’t know you at all, will tell you what your capabilities are. When you feel the doubt creep in and comments can feel too loud, remember that there is no stock-standard version of success, no box to try to fit into. The only person that has the right to tell you what you are capable of, is yourself. 

2. Let people be wrong about you.

Letting people be wrong about you (or a situation) while keeping your focus is the most underrated power move you can ever make. Sometimes people won’t understand the decisions you will make in your career, be that exploring different specialties, taking time to travel, working in non-clinical roles, or just taking a break. That is ok. The world doesn’t have to understand the choices you make. Just because you have studied medicine doesn’t mean that the only thing you can be in life is a doctor. 

Your career is a rich tapestry and you know what is going to work best for you and your life. 

3. Find your sparkle.

You often feel tired, not because you’ve done too much, but because you’ve done too little of what sparks a light in you. You need to find your spark and do what you enjoy. What is something you could get lost for hours in, purely because you are so interested and curious to find out more? If you can’t remember what that feels like, it can be helpful to look back on your life and think of the times where you felt the most excited. 

Medicine is a challenging and rewarding career. It is an absolute privilege to work with families when they are at their most vulnerable, but only if you keep sight of this and don’t get caught in the rat race. Medicine is full of incredibly accomplished, kind and admirable people who you will meet and have the opportunity to work with. 

However, medicine also has a culture of pushing people into this uniform single lane tunnel where the end goal is consultancy and any detours you take along the way can feel questionable. I know this way of thinking is changing, which I am pleased about. It is critical to find what you enjoy and pursue it, regardless of any criticism, or negative comments that might be made along the way. 

I have a breadth of work experience outside clinical medicine which has in no way hindered my career progression. Instead, it made me a better clinician and well-rounded mother, wife, sister, daughter, friend and colleague. At the end of the day, you will be working in your chosen field for at least 30 years. There is no rush to get there because once you are, you might find that you missed all the amazing opportunities along the way. If you were going to take a trip around the world, you would want to take the time to visit all the sites and explore. If you spend the entire trip waiting for your flight home, you have missed the point of the trip. 

4. You’ll never know everything.

You probably have already realised this in some way. There is one thing you will always be gaining: experience, and that is not to be underestimated. Take the feedback that patients give you on your skills as a doctor as a true indicator of your potential as a clinician. Not your grades on an arbitrary exam. I don’t care if I successfully diagnose a rare condition in a patient, what I care about is how that family felt, whether I empowered them, whether they trust me and how that will impact their healthcare experience. 

First and foremost, you are a HUMAN and then you are a doctor. You can train a monkey to do CPR, and you can ask an AI to tell you what the most likely diagnosis is from a bunch of clinical symptoms, but what you can’t get from a monkey or AI is a genuine connection with another human who cares about you and will advocate for you when you are at your most vulnerable and afraid.

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Just as ripples spread out when a single pebble is dropped into water, the actions of individuals can have far reaching effects. I consider myself to be a tiny pebble. I can’t change the world, but I can be the change I want to see in it. Just like you can.