Help! IT or Radiography and Medical Imaging

[vt297]

Hey guys,

Was just wondering if anyone could share their tips/advice.
I'm currently in year 12, and am still unsure of what course I'd really like to get into. I've always thought radio/medical imaging (@ monash) was the one goal that I've aim for, but more recently I've gained a slight interest in IT. (Sadly, there's not double degree available for health & IT)

My only worry, is that I did not take up computing and instead did bio & hhd 

[Aaron]

Wow.. Two completely different areas! Good on you for thinking about different options at least - that shows you have some interest.

I am from the IT space so if you have any q's feel free to ask.

I guess my question is to you: is your recent IT interest enough to pursue it as a university course over radio/medical imaging? Given these areas are completely different, i'd probably suggest the closest thing to what you're after in terms of both disciplines is health information systems.. Apart from that I can't really tell you a course that embeds both these areas somewhat (e.g. http://www.latrobe.edu.au/courses/health-information-management)

Personally I think you need to get as much advice as you can (go to open days etc) regarding both areas and make a decision as to the direction you want to go in.

Don't worry about VCE Computing, IT/Comp Sci courses assume you know nothing. Although you will need to check whether you meet pre-reqs.

[babushka818]

I'm a first year monash radiography student so if you have questions hit me up it's very competitive (10% entrance rate) but it's a great field, there's so many pathways and options from straight rad (rad therapy, ultrasound, diagnostics, you can get management roles etc.) and there's also a lot of jobs, hospitals usually have up to 100 radiographers working, even clinics might have 5 radiographers. I think it's actually a pretty underrated profession but it's great and so rewarding. Ultimately it's not an easy course, we're at 26 hours a week from first year with 6 placements and a 6 month internship in the degree (I've been at uni for like 4 months and already done a 2 week placement in hospital!). The monash course is pretty comprehensive but yeah passion and interest is necessary otherwise it's a hell of a lot of work and stress

[vox nihili]

Not sure that there's much in the way of courses that relate to this, but in actual fact, there are a lot of jobs in health IT. Health informatics, as it's called, is the use of computers basically to manage health data and to extract information from those data. It's a huge growth area and, I believe, a really interesting one. SO there's definitely a lot of scope to combine these passions

EDIT: Aaron already pointed out some of this stuff....great minds think alike or do your reading vox, I'll let you decide :p