All entries for Wednesday 10 December 2014

Working 9–5 (and then 6–11) is no way to make a living…

I’ve had a part time job for most of my life since I got a paper round aged 14. I’m lucky in that my parents help me out financially when they are able to, but I’ve always felt better about accepting their help in the knowledge that I have made at least some effort to earn some cash myself.

I knew that working whilst at medical school might be tricky as we do have a lot of work to do outside hospital hours, and I’ve also had to do some out-of-hours hospital shifts in the evenings and at weekends.

Currently, I work at a bar on the university campus, doing one or two, four or five hour shifts a week. This means that I often have to go straight from hospital to work, which means I can be out of the house for a good 16 hours.

Although it is hard work, I have found that working in something completely non-medical can actually be quite relaxing. It’s nice to be able to turn up, switch off to a certain extent, and pour pints for a few hours. I’ve also made a few non-medical friends along the way, which is a really nice thing to have when you’re fed up of talking to your medic housemates about whether or not they could hear the patient’s heart murmur on Ward 11, how long is it until finals (in days, hours, minutes, and seconds) and how many cannulations they’ve managed to do this week, when you last did a successful one about a month ago.

The one thing that I have learnt at work though is to be very careful about who you tell that you’re a medical student. Obviously our customers talk to us, and lots of us are students so they ask us what we’re studying. Usually when I say medicine, people often react in one of 3 ways:

1. “Oooo you must be clever!” (No, if I was clever I would have done dentistry and be earning loads of money by now, rather than doing a full time course and working here in the evenings).
2. “Ohhhh you’re going to be so rich, I read in the Daily Mail recently that all GP’s earn £150k a year…” (Not true, I did actually think that being a doctor would make me rich, mostly thanks to the Daily Mail, but after further examination of the facts, it was revealed that this is sadly inaccurate.)
3. “Oh interesting you should say that, I’ve had this stomach ache for a while now….” (Please continue to tell me about your bowel movements in excruciating detail at a volume that the whole bar can hear. But seriously, go and see your GP.)

Now, it is nice that people want to show an interest in you and share their medical stories with you, but after a long day at hospital and when you view yourself as, “off duty,” it isn’t always great. Unfortunately, I’m a really bad liar, so the occasions when I’ve told people that I study economics haven’t worked out very well, mostly because our bar is next door to Warwick Business School, which is full of people studying economics.

Alternatively, there is the option that one customer told me that his doctor-wife uses to avoid people asking her medical opinion at dinner parties, which is to tell everyone that she works in the GUM clinic…

Megan Earle : 10 Dec 2014 10:19 |  Tags: Bar Mbchb Sarah Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem