What field are you applying for residency?
Every fourth year medical student faces this question as they prepare to make arguably the biggest career decision of their life. The field you choose determines the kind of career you will have for the next 30-50 years. And it is now harder than ever to make this decision. How do I know? Well, I am currently one of these fourth year students.
I always believed and was always told that my clinical rotations during third year and early fourth year would help me decide. Spoiler alert: they haven’t. Unfortunately, there is simply not enough time during the clinical years to get a true experience of every field. For broad fields like Internal Medicine and Family Medicine, there is simply not enough time in 4-12 weeks to experience every aspect of the field. For more narrow fields like Neurology or Anesthesiology, many medical schools do not even require students to spend any time in these fields.
The other issue is that for better or worse, medical students (and even residents to some extent) are asked to do less and less as many hospitals worry about liability. As a result, medical students do not get to experience what senior doctors experience, In surgery, a medical student does little more than retracting, basic knot tying and simple suturing. How can a student possibly know if he would one day like to be a senior surgeon, cutting skin, suturing muscle, and removing organs? The same can be said of any field, especially the more hands-on ones.
Another issue is the varying quality of clinical rotations. Any number of factors including time of year, hospital location, patient population, workload of staff physicians, and even your student colleagues can effect your view of a field. I say don’t let it. Each field is about so much more than the experience you get of it during a small time period at just 1 hospital.
So the actual experience you have during your medical school clinical rotations isn’t the best way to decide what field to go into. How then can you know? Well, I’ve developed some ideas over the past few months that have definitely helped me:
1. Talk to people in the field.
This is one way to use your time on the rotation to help you decide. Ask the residents and attendings what made them choose their area of practice. Ask them what they love and hate, so you can build your own pros and cons. You should even ask them what makes a good doctor in that field and what makes a bad one. This is how you see if your own strengths and weakness line up with a given field.
2. Research what personal characteristics fit each field.
There are a multitude of personality tests to help students find their ideal medical specialty. I’d say do these, at multiple points in your medical school career, as your personality may change.
The best book I have found on this topic is The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Medical Specialty. It was also the inspiration and source material for much of this post.
3. Write a personal statement.
A fellow medical student told me that someone had told her that if you are still deciding between a couple fields, write a personal statement for each one. Then see which one you felt better fits you and better captures who you are. Which one was easier to write?
I didn’t really believe this at first, but then I tried it because every student has to write a personal statement for every field they apply to. It was an extremely powerful tool. And you don’t even have to wait until application season to try it out.
4. Start early.
Don’t be like me—and most other students—and wait until the clinical years. You can start talking to doctors and researching different specialties as a first year student.
5. Soul Search.
The first step to figuring out your ideal medical specialty is to figure out yourself. You cannot determine if a field suits you unless you know your own interests, values, and passions. Do you like seeing patients in the hospital (emergency, surgery, medicine, etc), clinic (primary care), or not at all (pathology, radiology)? Do you like working with your hands (surgery, anesthesia, GI, cardio, etc) or not? Do you like seeing patients acutely (emergency, urgent care, surgery) or over long periods of time (internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics)? Do you like treating kids (pediatrics), adults (internal medicine), or women (OBGYN)? What is your favorite organ system? Favorite subjects in medical school?
All of these questions and more will help you figure out what you want in a career. That will lead you to the right specialty for you.