← all questions · Choosing a specialty
No. You have to tolerate its worst day for thirty years, and want it enough to survive the entry process — which is the part that actually demands obsession. Scale the enthusiasm you need to the length of the queue: FRACGP is three years FTE from entry 1, surgical SET is five to six after the unaccredited years 3.
Liking it is enough; the entry queue is what needs the fuel. Nobody audits your passion once you are on. What burns people is the run-up — the unaccredited years, the courses, the repeat applications — and that is where a merely-interested candidate runs out of road. So set your required enthusiasm by the length of the queue, not by the job. FRACGP is three years FTE from entry 1. Surgery is five to six years of SET, and RACS itself is quoted on that figure without counting the unaccredited registrar years that precede it 3.
The sub's dominant position is that passion is overrated and lifestyle is not. The highest-scoring answers say pick the job that leaves you a life, provided you have some genuine interest in the work 4. The counter-testimony is from people who did chase the thing they loved and found the training culture stripped the enjoyment out of it — one poster switched from a surgical subspecialty to radiology for exactly that reason 5.
The better filter than love is tribe and tolerance. Two heuristics recur: would you want to be in the pub with these registrars, and which specialty's worst bits do you mind least 45. Both are answerable from a single term. "Do I love this" usually is not.
Where love does matter. The programs with the longest, most punitive entry — surgery, ophthalmology, dermatology — extract years of unpaid-ish CV work before you are competitive, and people who were lukewarm tend to stop paying. That is selection, not vocation.
Counter-argument, and it is a real one. Money follows the punishing programs. ATO 2023–24 medians: neurosurgery $537,049 against psychiatry $276,453 and general practice $156,733 2. Choosing tolerability over passion is a choice you can afford; just make it with the number in front of you.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
Instead I am willingly neglecting my family for the next year to learn hundreds of operations and approaches I will never ever see or use.
Honestly passion for work is overrated. If you pick a lifestyle specialty, you'll be able to spend more time with family, friends, hobbies etc which translates to overall happiness. There is more to life than work. This is provided you have some interest in your job
Yes I switched from a surgical subspecialty that I was passionate about to radiology. The lifestyle and culture wore me down and sapped any enjoyment from surgery.
I once got great advice from a surgical registrar that you pick your specialty based on whether the registrars felt like "your tribe"
Asked 7 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /(passion|love|enjoy|interest).{0,40}(specialt|specialit)|(specialt|specialit).{0,30}(passion|love)/i. Quotes are the top-scoring comments in the passion-vs-lifestyle threads, deliberately pairing the 'passion is overrated' consensus with a surgical trainee's regret; the main thread's own comments are absent from the dump so quotes come from its two nearest siblings.