my MRBS offer

I recieved an email yesterday from UQ. This is what they said:

Dear Sida:
I would like to inform you that a Medical Rural Bonded Scholarship(MRBS) place has become available. If you are interested in receivingthis scholarship, please let me know as soon as possible (the next dayor so) so I can send you a contract in the mail.

Actually the email was sent on Thursday, so when I read this on Friday morning, you can imagine my panic. I have less than two short hours before work to decide to accept or decline!

Let me describe the scholarship to those who don't know about it. It is a bid by the government to try and get doctors into rural or remote areas. What happens is this: they give you around $23,000 a year, for the duration of your medical degree (four years, accumilating to nearly 100,000). After you graduate, you train as per usual, and after you have reached your destination (whether you want to be a specialist or a GP), you go and work in a rural area for 6 years. If you are a specialist, the 'rural' area can be a large centre such as cairns or toowoomba. If you are a GP it would have to be somewhere more remote than that.

I spent a whole agonising day thinking about it, the money is so nice it's hard to turn down. $23,000 a year as a student, it almost means I don't need to worry about work, and buy myself a niiice laptop and mp3 player and an expensive stethoscope and all that. But then, to give 6 years away post fellowship (which is almost 10 years down the track) is too much. I do have a view to work in rural areas, but only for short times, and only intermittently, and not BOUND to it.

To breach the contract, you will have to give the money back plus interest, but more importantly, you can't work privately and bill to medicare for 12 years.

I chose not to take it in the end, as I don't really want to be bound when my future is still undecided. I don't want to take it only to break the agreement. One day, though, I may regret my decision, I may end up spending 6 years in a rural place anyways (although I doubt it, especially post fellowship). When I look at people with scholarships, not worrying much about money, I will think, that could have been me. But oh well.