For those of you who chose EM late

[Idiopathic]

What were you considering and what changed your mind? Note: by late, I mean like the end of MS-III

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[doc05]

the end of MSIII is not late. EM is not an early match!

 

[jazz]

i decided august of my ms iv year.

surgery was the other leading contender.

knew i didn't want to do im. too late for subspecialties of surg (none of which i liked anyhow). er has a much better lifestyle, shorter resiedncy, and good pay when you're done. definitely one of the fields that still allows you to do some procedures (central lines, chest tubes, lacs, etc) and that was good enough for me. when i did my subI in surgery realized that being in the OR was not as fun the second time around (i.e. the first appy was cool, the second one was kind of not as cool) and i thought "i don't want to do this for every"

a lot of my classmates who went into er were choosing between ent and er.

 

[jazz]

oh and btw, everyday i am thankful that i saw the light and chose er.

my decision is affirmed when i do my shifts in the er, go home sleep, and come back and the same surgery residents are on.

again, reaffirmed, when i am rounding for four hours on medicine

 

[ERMudPhud]

I applied and interviewed in EM and IM. I didn't really even make up my mind until I put in my match list. I ended up ranking my top 3 EM choices followed by a bunch of IM choices. Ultimately it was a whole collection of factors that pushed me one way. I realized that the clinical perspective and environment of EM suited my personality the best. I also realized that the fields of IM that interested me the most clinically interested me the least from a research perspective. EM would give me the flexibility and time to do whatever research interested me. Finally, my wife was an EM doc and she pushed me quite hard in this direction as well. Its been a fun time the last 6 years and although I still wonder how things would have turned out if I had followed the traditional MD/PhD route into IM I can't say I have any regrets.

 

[Sessamoid]

I'd always been leaning towards EM, but had considered a couple IM subspecialties (cards, pulm/critcare), plastics, and ortho. It was clear pretty early on though that EM suited my personality best.

 

[iwakuni_doc]

Even before I got into medical school, I was locked onto orthopedics - wouldn't even consider anything else throughout medical school & matched into a surgery internship in the Navy. My very last month of medical school was EM & I really enjoyed it, but I was still very set in my mind that I was going to do ortho.

During internship, I got the opportunity to do a month of trauma & another month of EM during which I discovered that there was a lot of medicine that I found interesting in addition to ortho. Fortunately in the Navy, I then had a 2-yr tour as a flight surgeon to get a real good feel for what my professional interests really were & how best I could pursue them.

EM has all the best elements of what I enjoyed from ortho (acute diagnosis & treatment of M/S injuries, opportunity for specialization in sports medicine) while also challenging me in many other areas of medicine that I find stimulating (trauma, cardio, pulm, GI, infectious disease).

I count myself fortunate that I've had the opportunity to take a couple years of practice to figure out what was the best fit for me.