..why is a Doctor on The Apprentice?

I guess Leah's business plan must be medical related

Tired of looking at willies all day?

Just because you have a medical degree doesn't mean you have to spend the next 50 years working for the NHS, plenty of people who have become doctors have gone on to do other things

She's 24 - that's quite young to be a Doctor and she's working in an NHS hospital - long way to go before she's a consultant on a fat whack or a GP with a cushy practice. I'd imagine long shifts lots of scut work etc and a salary of say £30K.

I'd imagine a £250,000 business opportunity looks pretty sweet in comparison

It's good to have ambition and people want to change their careers all the time, so good for her.

Either that or maybe she wants to follow in the footsteps of Michelle and be a slebrity.

Atm my money is on her wanting to start a magazine to do with kids health.

Or make-up, and she's been handing out freebies since the start and the rest are her real-life advert of the product. In which case she deserves to win for being a genius.

That's very young to be a doctor, she's probably only just graduated, and I think that if she stops being one, she should be paying back everything that her training cost, given that courses are subsidised.

What a stupid suggestion.

This argument is only ever applied to medicine. No-one ever complains about English graduates who don't write novels, for instance.

It's not only applied to medicine but it is applied to those degrees that lead to an obvious profession.

Doctors, nurses, dentists, lawyers, teachers etc all follow degree based courses that are leading pretty much solely to one career. If they decide that they don't want to do this career then that is quite a lot of public money down the drain - or at least it used to be. I don't know how much money it actually takes to fund a university course (i.e. whether it's significantly more than the current maximum fee) but I can see why someone would take exception to someone using public money to fund their course and then never even trying the job it led to.

An English degree isn't so career led. It's not a novel writing course - it often leads to a teaching career. Likewise, a maths degree can lead to many professions; you really can't pigeon-hole that graduate into a specific career.

In a way it's become irrelevant as students have to fund their own degree courses (although if certain courses are more expensive than the fees I still see argument) but the question is - do students who take funding from the government for a specific career orientated degree course have an obligation to repay at least a certain amount of years' service or should we simply take heart in the fact that more young people are being educated to a higher standard irrespective of the career they eventually choose?

Why?

If the UK has just spent several tens of thousands of pounds training someone to be a doctor, why should they be allowed to just throw that away? Not only that, but with the competition there is for medical school places, she will have kept out someone who probably would have become a doctor, which is also mean.

If I get sent on any training course at work, and then leave within two years, I have to pay the money back, they should too.

Do English graduates get trained specifically to write novels? Or just to critique them? Anyway, it's only a 3 year course, medicine costs several orders of magnitude more to train, and lasts for 5 years, I believe (or is it 7? I always get mixed up with vets).

They're not comparable.

The thing is she could be developing a product for the medical market while still working as a doctor and if she becomes mega famous she could make more money and therefore pay more taxes than if she was sat in some little office in a hospital looking at peoples bunions for 8 hours a day

Harry Hill and Lee Nelson are both qualified doctors but probably pay more tax these days than their NHS salaries would of been pre tax so it can work out better for the public purse/wellfare in the long run than just having some bored doctor paying scant attention writing out prescriptions in a back end small doctors practice

A lot of the latter part of the training is 'on the job' for which they get paid a pittance - the NHS claws back quite a bit of its outlay there.And to pick up on your own point - would the same apply to vets who dont go on to stick their arms up cows for a living? Where do you draw the line?
I read Geology which was a three year course but relatively expensive as there was a lot of field work and lab work involved. Since I have never actually worked as a geologist do I have to pay back my fees too?

It would be absurd for anyone practising or not, to pay fees again when it's never been suggested anyone attending uni pre 1998 should have to pay back their grants.

I'm presuming the suggestion is from someone who didn't have to pay fees. Anyone who paid their fees would be in a safer position.

As I've already said, this only becomes an issue if the fees paid are significantly less then the costs incurred for the profession. Are they? Were they? Will they be? Are we that strapped for cash in this country that we can't see the benefits of having a young person educated to a higher degree without insisting on raking back any costs?

The hope should be some employer somewhere benefits from an individual’s education however they may veer from their original chosen career path unless, as with The Apprentice, they are capable of benefitting themselves. Everything evolves.

Medicine is a wide field. It could be anything from recruitment, to practicing some form of specialism, to medical software, or hardware.

The problem comes if its cosmetic surgery which he might not want to support if its the beauty, rather than the repair and undo of plastic surgery. On the other hand she could want to do something charitable like cleft lip surgery or cataract removal or basic medical training in Africa which he would find difficult not to support. She's young though, so really you wonder what she could branch into at that age and just what she will offer.

The public money issue can't rely be applied. People do all sorts of things with degrees in something else. The value of a good degree is that it develops more than subject knowledge. Jason has 3 degrees in History/Greek Studies . We have no idea at al yet l if he's proposing using whats been invested in him to the full either.

Just one little comb...
That's all I ask. it's getting on my nerves now

I didn't realise she was so young though, so she's going through that 'what was I thinking?' phase we all have to pass through.