Transcript
I joined the Navy as a medical student in my fifth year of a 6 year degree and I would have to say my prime motivation was that I had less and less time because my university holidays were contracting to earn money to support myself for the following year. And a friend of mine had joined the Army as an undergraduate and I thought, "They pay you to go to university. Perhaps this will be for me".
I do have an uncle who is in the Air Force and had served. BUTTERWORTH But really I've had not that much involvement with military. But, as I said, this friend of mine seemed to enjoy being an Army undergraduate. So I went down to the recruiting office and I looked to see which service would suit me the best and I applied for the Navy … I was probably ignorant and underprepared for the interview process that I went through, but I was prepared to, you know, do my best in whatever I did. So I thought, well, "This will be something interesting".
And at that time I thought, "Well, that's not for the rest of my life I've got a return of service obligation, and if I don't like it, I can return to my career in medicine" ... it was for two years plus one year after that. So for three years return to service obligation and um, and that seemed pretty distant at that point in time because I was just starting my fifth year.
I wouldn't have had to do that until I'd done two years working as in hospital. So that was four years away … at that point I just knew that that was an obligation that I had coming up but my life didn't change very much other than that I had a bit more money to support myself and I didn't have to work quite so hard on other jobs.
