You’ve earned your medical degree, slogged your way through your PhD and now emerging from your books find yourself blinking in the daylight.
But what are you going to do with all that knowledge now that you have it?
How about pulling on a white coat and heading not for the ward rounds in a general hospital but to a laboratory?
More than £1.4 billion is spent annually on medical research in the UK by the 140 members of the Association of Medical Research Charities.
In order to take their work forward they need people with dedication and an exceptional level of attention to detail.
You may have started out wanting to be a doctor but somewhere along the line the idea you could help not just one person at a time but potentially hundreds of thousands may have taken over . . . and you now find yourself on a career path to medical research.
There are all sorts of medical vacancies on s1jobs, but if you have set your sights on research, you’ll need to have patience and often a willingness to take the long view – sometimes it can be decades before projects finally come up with the results that make a difference.
Some research is aimed at developing new drugs or improving existing treatments, while other projects involve clinical research or investigating methods of prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a range of medical conditions.
But don’t think all this lab work will excuse you from developing communication skills.
Great discoveries are rarely solitary Eureka moments, they are the result of collaborative work – so you’ll need to develop great working relationships with colleagues and others in the same field, if you’re going to make real progress.
You’ll also need true grit not to be put off when one potential breakthrough after another turns out to be a dead-end.
Don’t worry: it’s not all a slog.
You’ll also have the opportunity to travel to conferences in locations around the world and the work you publish in scientific journals could boost your reputation and make you a leader in your field.
And even on the days when none of your experiments turns out as you’d wished, you’ll still have the satisfaction of knowing your work can make a difference to the health and wellbeing of millions.
Why not start by researching all of the latest Medical vacancies with s1jobs?