Want to use your physics degree for good? Nuclear Medicine Physicist Daniel McGowan explains how.
I’m a trainee medical physicist specialising in nuclear medicine at the Churchill Hospital, based in Oxford.
It’s to do with oncology (cancer) and diagnostic (for example kidney function. These are treated or investigated with a dose of radiation and one aspect of the job is to check that the radiation levels are safe.
When I qualify, I will advise radiographers who do the diagnostic tests or administer injections and will generally be on hand for complex issues.
I will have to ensure that all equipment, such as a pet scanner or a gamma scanner, is working correctly.
When I did my undergraduate degree at Oxford University, my tutor taught medical physics as an option. That’s how I heard about this field. As part of the course I got to do a tour of the hospitals.
I then applied to the NHS. It’s a competitive application process to get in but seeing the hospital definitely helped.
You can apply for four different locations, stating the order of priority. I landed my first choice in Oxford.
Salaries start quite low, around £23,000. But your pay goes up at the end of each year and you get a jump when you qualify.
When you qualify your pay goes up each year too.
You need to have done a degree in Physics and then be accepted onto a four-year training programme.
The first two years are part 1 and will include a post-graduate masters course (either full or part-time).
Knowing that I am using Physics for good. In my role I am helping patients. When I was at uni, I did a three-month internship with a defence company. It was interesting but I think my current job is a much more useful way of using my physics knowledge.
Also, I love working for the NHS. You can clearly see the benefit of what you do on the public as a whole.
The training is quite long from start to finish, especially when you’ve already done a degree.
Also, writing up portfolios can be tough. For part one of the training you have to write three different portfolios of 60-80 pages. Doing this on top of the masters and everything else is pretty hard work.
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