Medicine is a profession with a multiplicity of choices and opportunities. Defining your area in medicine is an evolutionary process that you have already begun. As you make your way through your education, you will gather information to make the best career decision possible. An exciting and rewarding part of medical education is taking advantage of opportunities to shape your future professional life.
Making the right career choice is one of the most important activities you will do while in medical school. Along the way are a number of concerns that are common to virtually all students.
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Chief among them are:
- Deciding on the specialty area for one’s professional career.
- How to prepare for securing a residency position even if a specialty area has not been chosen.
- How to decide on which residency programs to apply to.
- How to assure the best possible Match.
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Those of you who are undecided about a specialty area should not despair. Surveys have shown that only about 25% of medical students have chosen a medical specialty prior to entering medical school and that at least one-half change their mind along the way. The third year of medical school is particularly important in the career decision making process in that approximately 50% of students who were uncertain at the beginning of the year select a field of medicine by the end of the year. The remaining 25% make a decision during the early part of Year Four after taking one or more clinical electives in the fields they are under considering. Therefore, the probability is overwhelming that you will select a specialty by the fall of your Fourth Year and be enthusiastic about your decision. Further, the odds are excellent that you will match in the specialty of your choice and in a residency program of your choice as well. Greater than 95% of our students have successfully matched each year in the past, and the majority matched with a residency program that was one of their top choices.
Deciding on a field of medicine for your career
This is not an easy decision for most students to make. There are more than 20 specialties to select from, and there is limited or no contact during medical school with a number of them. This is particularly true during the first two years.
A number of factors are important in making a career decision, and some really do not come into play until the third year and fourth year clinical rotations.
Some of the factors include:
- Your prior experiences (earlier career, research, volunteering).
- Your personality and skills and how they compliment a particular specialty, e.g.; whether you like to take action and resolve problems immediately or follow problems longitudinally over time; like to do procedures or prefer more cerebral challenges; prefer to care for children, adults, or both, or deliver babies; want to practice a broad field or be focused as a subspecialist in a more narrow highly specialized area.
- Experience gained and satisfaction derived from working in and learning about a particular field.
- Your experience with physicians and residents who serve as role models.
- Your performance during the clinical clerkships and the USMLEs, i.e. how competitive you are for a given area.
- The opportunities in one field compared to the others.
- Income and lifestyle considerations.
- Special circumstances, e.g. a disability, military obligation, etc...
For most students, deciding on a career is based on integrating many different experiences and considerations over time. There is no one equation that can be used to determine which specialty is best for you although some of the workshops we conduct offer a process by which you can compare yourself to those of physicians in each of the different medical specialties. Like life, time in medical school offers an enormous array of opportunities and experiences in many different venues that ultimately provide the data base from which you should be able to make an intelligent well thought out decision. Career development opportunities are present throughout the first three and a half years of medical school. (See Time Table) For convenience, they can be divided into curricular and extracurricular activities.
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