I’m currently in my 4th year of Medicine at Monash University. This post is pretty similar to my post on ‘Why I chose medicine’, check it out here if interested! Here’s a short list of my main pros and cons of doing Medicine in no particular order:

Pros:

  • The cohort, 1000% this is the biggest pro of doing medicine.

    • Medicine is extremely similar to high school (same classes with the same people and schedules) but with more freedom (can go to places between classes etc).

    • I’m pretty social in general so this is something I took for granted prior to doing medicine, but I’ve found my best friend, made soo many memories over the years, and is always the first thing that comes to mind for the pros of medicine.

    • During exam times, everyone is extremely supportive and helps each other out. Medicine at Monash is PGO, which encourages collaboration over competition and this is especially apparent when the group chats are full of notes, explaining concepts to others, etc.

  • The subject matter:

    • The content is genuinely interesting and engaging. Medicine as a field has been around for thousands of years, but still there’s tons of new developments and discoveries happening weekly. It’s also fun developing clinical reasoning skills and gratifying when you solve a case.

    Cons:

  • Lack of electives:

    • Medicine at Monash works the same as doing a ‘double degree’ (you graduate with both a Bachelor of Medical Science and a Doctor of Medicine), hence no electives.

    • I wish there were electives to explore other courses/fields, I like Melbourne University’s breadth program where students have to take something outside their degree. This makes for interesting perspectives and overall more well rounded students.

  • The time commitment:

    • The 9-5 placement hours and the extra study needed to stay on top of the content can be draining at times. Overall this is a relatively minor con though, and applies to basically every full-time degree.

  • The looming threat of AI :

    • While learning the content is enjoyable, there’s always this feeling in the back of my mind that it might be futile. LLMs have already achieved superhuman performance when it comes to clinical reasoning, and progress is inevitable. Medicine, alongside most knowledge work, will likely see massive changes due to AI.

Relatively short post, I’ll likely flesh this out a lot more in the future. Thank you for reading hope you enjoyed!!