I grew up on a small family farm in southwest Western Australia, both my parents are university educated and expected me to go to uni, but as the oldest son I was also expected to take over the farm.

Did okay in high school, wasn’t all that dedicated of a student. I was accepted into a double degree studying environmental biology and cultural anthropology, because why, not the point was to get an education, not a job. I did fairly well at school but I struggled to get a part time job as a shy 18 year old, I couldn’t get student allowance as I was technically part owner of several million dollars of land through a family trust, and my parents couldn’t support me because of a couple of bad seasons and anyway it’s a pretty asset rich/cash poor business.

Because I liked science I applied for a job as a lab tech at a winery, failed to get that but the offered me a job as a cellar hand and I spent 4 months working 12h shifts. Left that job with more cash in my pocket than I’ve ever had before so I spent the rest of that year travelling around Australia and then Europe.

Running out of money I came back to Australia, I had a friend who was washing dishes at Ayers Rock resort, I joined him. Someone in HR noticed on my resume that I had a truck license and forklift ticket and I was promoted to delivering in-flight catering to the airport. Got sick of the bosses nonsense so a girl I was seeing got me a job doing stargazing tours, spent the next several years in various tourism jobs.

Decided at that point I might as well get that education I was wanting. I enrolled in a double degree again, this time in Economics and International Development, it turns out International Development is code for tedious human geography so I changed to Political Science. During my final year a friend of mine was applying for medicine, I thought that sounded interesting, decided to sit the entrance exam and drop economics as I didn’t want maths heavy, complex Econ to tank my GPA.

Didn’t get into my first choice of med school so moved across the country to study, wound up in the rural and remote medicine track. After doing my hospital time I started working in general practice, I found the culture of GP so disgustingly focussed on manipulating Medicare that patient care took a back seat, also on one occasion I was told I needed to start charging a patient a bigger rate because “having patients like that in the waiting room isn’t a good look”.

I decided to leave GP and return to the public hospital system, a mentor of mine thought that’d be a shame and found a small town practice owned by portly British West country ex-navy surgeon who described himself as a cloth cap socialist. I obviously took that job.

He sold the practice a couple of years later, the new owner is as penny pinching and money grubbing as my first GP employer but I now have the confidence to stand up for my patients, I also now know that management telling individual doctors how to bill is considered price fixing by the ACCC. I also have enough experience and reputation within the community that it is best impossible for them to get rid of me.

I probably would have been happy as a farmer, or as a medical specialist or a surgeon although the training might’ve killed me(at the time it was common for surgical trainees to work 24h shifts). As it is I don’t my time between chronic diseases, preventative care, palliation, paediatrics, mental health, and emergency. I can’t imagine a better place to end up.

I agree and I’d like to add that education systems that treat WW2 as the war to understand is actively harmful.

In part due to characteristics of the war and in part due to how it is taught and remembered.

Just 2 examples

• WW2 can be quite easily presented as having clear good guys and bad guys which makes it fairly unhelpful to study to understand modern conflicts.
• Chamberlain is consistently painted as a naive idiot for trying to prevent a war through diplomacy. Whether or not it was futile in that case isn’t really relevant, when WW2 is the only war most people study in any depth then all attempts at avoiding conflict get characterised as naive appeasement.

This is the correct answer. At some point paediatricians and other folks interested in child development standardised the meaning of infant as above but unless you’re a paediatrician they are completely interchangeable.

I have a personal website, not a business one but if all you want is to display some information and contact details etc then Hover for domain hosting and Squarespace for the website, they are easy to use and relatively cheap for a simple website that looks professional. If you want things like e-commerce or online booking you might want something else although linking to another service from a Squarespace site could work.

I’m currently shifting to self hosting and having troubles with Hover, but for an easy to use service that doesn’t require any technical knowledge it works fine. They also offer email@yourdomain.com which I use as my main personal email with no worries.

Please don’t just have a Facebook page, it becomes a real pain for non-facebook users, especially on mobile, and it makes you look like a complete amateur.

Guitar and ukelele are relatively easy to learn and don’t require reading music. Ukelele would probably be a bit easier on your joints though.