How to Find Flexible At-Home Freelance Work for Medical Graduates Studying for PG Exams
It’s 9:17 pm, my 4-year-old’s been asleep for 12 minutes, and I’m leaning against our kitchen counter scrolling my phone while my leftover pasta goes cold. Half my brain is still replaying the difference between hemolytic and aplastic crisis in sickle cell disease, the other half is bored out of its mind staring at NCERT diagrams stacked on the dining table. I’m an MBBS graduate, staying home while I prep for my postgraduate entrance exam, and for months I’d been wondering what I could do with the 3 to 6 hours of free time I have each week when my daughter’s at preschool and I’m done with my daily study target. I wanted extra cash for things like soccer fees and my monthly coffee subscription without dipping into my partner’s paycheck, and I also wanted to try something that wasn’t just memorizing drug dosages all day.
I started by posting a generic freelance profile on a popular platform, saying I was available for writing work. I got offers to write product descriptions for skincare brands and listicles about budget travel. None of it used anything I’d spent 5 years learning in medical school, and the pay was so low I’d have to give up half my study time just to make $100. That didn’t work for me. I didn’t want to put my PG prep at risk for side money. Then a classmate from med school, who was also prepping for her entrance a year ahead of me, told me to stop looking for any work and start looking for work that fits what I already know.
She told me to start small, since my main priority would always be studying, so I tried the lowest-effort option first: answering student questions as a medical subject expert on Chegg. It took 20 minutes to fill out the application, upload a scanned copy of my MBBS degree, and I got approved in 3 days. I just open the app when I’m waiting for my daughter to finish art class, or when I take a 30-minute break between study blocks, and pick questions that I already know the answer to. Most questions take 5 to 10 minutes, I make around $15 an hour doing it, and there are no mandatory hours. If I have a big mock exam week coming up, I just don’t open the app, and no one emails me asking where I am.
After that first small win, I got more comfortable branching out. I made a simple Upwork profile, listed my degree, and noted that I was looking for small, flexible projects that fit around a study schedule. Within a week, I got a gig writing 4 patient education handouts for a small medical communications company. The topics were managing childhood asthma and gestational diabetes, which I’d already covered in depth in med school, so I didn’t have to do weeks of extra research. I finished all 4 in two afternoons, got paid $300, and they’ve given me small projects every month since.
I also keep an eye on niche job boards for medical-focused freelance work, which is where I find most of my steady gigs. The American Medical Writers Association has a public job board that lists freelance openings for writers, fact checkers, and content reviewers, and PharmaVoice posts similar roles for medical communications work. A lot of wellness and health influencers now hire people with medical backgrounds to fact check their social media posts before they go up, too — I’ve done a couple of those for $50 a post, just reading through a draft and flagging any misleading or incorrect health claims, and that’s easy enough to do on my phone while I’m waiting in the pickup line at preschool.
A few friends in my study group do remote medical scribing, which works really well for people who prefer set shifts instead of random small projects. A lot of telehealth companies and urgent care clinics hire freelance per-diem scribes to update patient notes during appointments, and you pick only the shifts that fit your schedule. Companies like ScribeEMR and Aeromed hire remote scribes regularly, and one of my friends does three 4-hour shifts a week that cover all her study material costs without cutting into her prep time. If you like teaching, you can also do one-on-one tutoring for pre-med or first-year MBBS students on Wyzant, or apply to write and review questions for medical exam question banks — companies like Amboss and Lecturio are always hiring freelance contributors, and it even helps you review your own entrance exam material while you get paid.
The biggest thing I’ve learned is that you don’t need to build a whole new business or commit to 20 hours a week right away. I keep my total work time under 6 hours a week, which fits right into the free time I already had between study blocks and parenting. You also don’t need a fancy website or a huge portfolio — I just have a PDF of my degree and a short list of three small projects I’ve done, and that’s enough for almost every client I’ve worked with. Most importantly, lean into your training: as an MBBS graduate, you have a skill set most other freelancers don’t, so don’t undersell yourself by taking low-paying generic gigs that don’t use what you already know.
Right now, my main goal is still getting that PG seat, and freelancing doesn’t get in the way of that. Some days I wonder if I’ll keep doing medical content writing even after I start my residency — it’s nice to have something that feels like my own, apart from clinical medicine and parenting my daughter. It doesn’t make me rich, and some weeks I don’t have any time to work at all if I’m cramming for an exam. But it fits right now, it lets me earn a little extra money and try something new without upending all my plans. I’m still figuring out what I want long term, and that’s okay. This is just the step that works for me right now.
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