← all questions · Choosing a specialty
Not off a list. Pick on the day-to-day work and on the life your consultants visibly lead, because that is the job you are buying. Weigh three things you can actually check: hours (GPs 35.7/wk, specialists 40.6 2), median income 1, and whether you can realistically get on. Prestige is not one of them.
Nobody chooses this from a spreadsheet. In the threads where people describe how they actually decided, it is always a rotation and a group of people — a term they hated, a registrar cohort that felt like their tribe, a consultant whose life looked survivable 3. The framing the sub upvotes hardest is to look at the consultants in front of you, because their life is the one you are signing up for; the training years are the toll, not the destination 3.
Three things you can actually check before you commit.
Money separates less than people think at the median and a lot at the top. ATO 2023–24 medians: neurosurgery $537,049, ophthalmology $497,094, anaesthetics $457,287, psychiatry $276,453, general practice $156,733 1. Read those as medians, not salaries — taxable income is after practice costs, is not FTE-adjusted, and the mean is dragged up by a small private-practice tail 1.
Hours separate more than pay does. GPs average 35.7 hours a week, specialists 40.6, and specialists-in-training 43.8 2. Per-specialty hours are not in the summary table — you have to query the interactive tool 2.
Entry odds belong in the decision, not after it. The old advice to do what you enjoy assumed you could get onto anything; several jurisdictions now publish selection numbers that make that assumption unsafe, and the sub says so bluntly 4.
The test that travels best is not "which specialty do I love" but "whose bad days do I mind least" — every job has bread and butter that goes stale, so compare the worst bits, not the highlights 5.
Counter-argument. Most people who are happy did not plan it. They tried things, hated most of them, and the one they minded least turned into a career. Optimising a choice you have not yet worked in is guesswork; getting broad exposure early is not.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
advice worked in an era where you'd be completely fine picking any specialty. That isn't the reality anymore.
Look at the lives your consultants lead - on average, it wont be dissimilar to yours on that particular pathway
Choose the job that lets you enjoy your not work life the most.
what specialty would you most want to go to the pub/hangout with? And what specialties 'worst bits' do you find the least shit? The idea being everyone's cool bits are cool, but what day to day bullshit will drive you the least mad?
Asked 33 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 /(choos|decid|pick|settl).{0,30}(specialt|specialit)|(specialt|specialit).{0,20}(choice|decision)|what specialt(y|ies) should/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in the 'how did you choose' threads, picked so the 'look at your consultants' heuristic sits beside the warning that free choice is no longer the market.