First year change of mind

[dankni6]

---

Members don't see this ad.

Got a hypothetical: SAY ya' did your first year of EM . . . and you ended up NOT enjoying it . . . THEN you decided to do something else that required a transition year (like gas) . . . COULD you use that first year of EM as your transition year? Anybody out there hear about a situation like that?

 

[PiPhiDoc]

Hi there,
I actually did 3 years of a four-year em program before I switched to anesthesiology. Although I did have an internal medicine internship for my EM program, I do believe that your EM year internship fulfills the ABA requirement for the non-anesthesiology year. As far as I know, it can be any 13 months of patient care that is non-anesthesia.
Good luck! (BTW -- I love anesthesiology, and I'm SO GLAD that I made the change, worth the headache of changing residencies)

 

[poi_and_beyond]

piphi,
what made you change your mind after so much EM?
Just curious.

 

[PiPhiDoc]

Our first year was internship (2-4 program), and I didn't decide to change until about 2 months into my R3 year (2nd year of EM), and I decided to finish out the year as to not completely screw all my classmates.
I think one reason it took me so long was that I LOVED my program, all of the residents were really close, really liked all of our faculty, and I consider our program director to be one of the most amazing physicians and mentors I have ever worked with. But I just HATED the job. It was also really hard to admit that I had not made the right choice -- I felt like such a loser.
But it all worked out well, I felt like I did the right thing by finishing out the year, and my EM training has certainly made the first few months of anesthesia a lot easier.

 

[ckent]

We had some good posts about transfering here in the IM forum:
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=80091

Remember that changing your specialty during residency isn't nearly as bad as deciding when you are 40 with kids that you hate your job and would be much happier doing another specialty. According to Iserson's Getting into Residency book, it's not that uncommon for physicians to change specialties too. I'd definitely reccomend people who are thinking about doing EM to do 2 EM rotations during med school (one during third yr, another during fourth yr) just to make sure that you like it though. I was very surprised during my EM rotation by how much I disliked that type of work (shift work, less focus on diagnosis and management, more focus just on acute care and stabilization). I think that people who like EM often have a very different personality type then say people who go into IM or neurology.