Does pursuing a medical career involve living in one community all of your life or moving to different cities/states/countries every couple of years?

Hi there,

The short answer:
Yes AND no. In other words, how often you move and how often you travel on your job depends on the type of job you want/are able to get.

The long answer:

There are a lot of different roles in the world of medicine. There's doctors, nurses, assistants, administrators - just to name a few. For each of these, there are different types of positions people in these roles can half.

Imagine that you decide to become a doctor. Here is just a sample of your options:
- You can become a doctor, work at a clinic in your community, and never leave. You might travel 2 times a year to attend a conference or training to improve your skills and knowledge.
- You can be a doctor that works about 30 minutes from where you live, and you drive there and back every day.
- You can be a doctor that works in the city where you live for most of the year, but you travel every summer, for 1-2 months, to another country to provide volunteer care to needy people.
- You can be that same person but decide that you want to join a group like Doctors Without Borders and move to another country to help people there for a long time. You can stay in one country for the rest of your life, or maybe travel every few years to a different place.

Each of those examples come with different styles of living. Some can provide you with a higher salary and better living conditions than others. Some are better for raising families than others. Some are more exciting than others.

As you keep going through your education, talk to people in the medical field to see what they're jobs are like - there's a lot of variety. Eventually, you will get to try or explore some of the different options, and start to feel what is right for you.

We forwarded your question to a friend who is a doctor and here's what he had to say: "You can do either. There are medical jobs all over and depending on what you want to do and your ambition. You can stay in the same place or move multiple times based on the opportunity that opens up. You can even do something called locum which your are like a doc for hire and they fly you around the country to work for places that have shortages."