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Hi, my name is Kyaw, and I’m a doctor training to be a GP.

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My job involves working at GP practice, seeing patients who come into the surgery

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having consultations over the telephone and making house visits.

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It’s very long hours – I get in at 8.30

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I don’t finish until 6:30 and it’s pretty much nonstop.

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I think one of the best things about being a GP

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is that you don’t know who’s going to walk in through that door so

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you don’t know what cases you’re going to be presented with.

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It might be a simple call to a skin rash to someone expressing chest pain

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so that variety is always interesting and always keeps things fresh.

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The drawbacks are the long hours.

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It’s the constant pressure.

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But you tend to work in teams, as you do in a lot of medicine,

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and just the interactions with your team members

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just really helps you to get through the day.

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I’ve taken a very unconventional route into medicine.

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I didn’t really enjoy school.

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I was never good at exams.

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I sat through GCSEs and A-levels, did very badly,

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but managed to scrape into university somehow.

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For my A-levels, I chose biology, chemistry and maths I think

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I did a degree in biotechnology, which is completely unrelated to medicine.

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I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.

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And then I went on to do a masters in IT – again had no idea

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what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go.

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So I then spent the next seven to ten years of my twenties

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just travelling around, doing odd jobs, living in different countries.

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And it wasn’t until my early thirties

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I’d say that I thought, I want to pursue medicine.

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I think the first thing I’d say is resilience.

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You are going to encounter failures

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either on a professional level, on a personal level, you will fail exams

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and you’ve got to have that inner core of belief in yourself

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and to have that stubbornness and just to get through it.

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So resilience, I think you’re going

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to be working in teams throughout your medical career

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and sometimes you might encounter people you don’t get on with

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You’ve just got to be professional about it.

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And yeah, and learn how to work with people and have empathy

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with not only your colleagues

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but more importantly, your patients

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And the most important thing is never lose sight of the fact that you’re there

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to help your patients.

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For my own experience, what I want to say is that it’s OK, it’s

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OK that you don’t know what you want to do

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when you’re in your early twenties, or in your mid twenties or even late thirties.

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I think there are always options out there.

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And if you if you have, you know, you set your mind to it, you will get there somehow.