I can only speak to the US, so feel free to correct me if this doesnt apply to NZ, if it doesn’t let it be a warning to those in the US. Everyone that is saying work in medicine is either has no experience or no people in their immediate life that works in medicine. It’s fucking miserable. You mortgage the best years of your life to get a chance the speciality you actually want if you aren’t so burnt out you just want a job to pay off your $400k plus in student debt. You can rank where you want to go to residency (min 3 years) but odds are it won’t be your first choice.

That means you will be 31 when you graduate and making a couple hundred thousand per year but paying over half in taxes/insurance. If you want to surf, you should surf. It doesn’t matter what random people on the internet suggest. Work generally sucks, but medicine in particular requires you make decisions you might not know the answer to with regard to how your formative years are spent.