It is unfortunate that at many medical schools, one cannot do a pathology rotation until 4th year. Hence, people who do these path rotations late in the game fall into two groups:
(1) People who hated all of 3rd year and pick pathology by exclusion.
(2) People who liked learning the pathology during 1st and 2nd year and the pathology rotation ends up sealing the deal.
Anyways, I was gonna refer you to the Eureka thread but you were a step ahead of me!
Actually, that thread was hijacked like 40 times so I don't blame ya.
My post in that thread though still stands. I don't really have much to add to that...I'll just cut and paste below:
I entered medical school not knowing F--- all (damn you LADoc00, you're making me spit out the F-bomb) what I wanted to do in terms of medical career. I only knew that I wanted to pursue full-time research eventually.
I guess I had a hunch that pathology COULD be for me when I was developing a list of potential PhD mentors with whom I would do a research rotation. I had two people in biochem and 5 people in pathology on my list. So I thought about pathology.
Soon thereafter, I found that I loved my first year pathology course. The teaching was most excellent and quite dynamic. This was the material which really clicked with me for some reason. I would go to the pathology lectures but skipped all others...another indirect sign.
Then there was second year...I never went to class but I would go to the pathology lab sessions in the afternoon where we would look at gross specimens and slides. Loved that stuff. Again, pathology was the bomb in my world.
Now M1 and M2 years for me was back in 1998-2000. Back then, people were telling me left and right about how the job market sucked and why physician-scientists should go into fields such as internal medicine and pediatrics. But at that point, I just took it all in, didn't care since I wouldn't have to make a final decision until several years later.
During grad school, my boss was a nephrologist. He would tell me over and over again, "You need to do a short-track internal medicine residency. The key for you is to do the shortest residency possible and then do a kickass postdoc." I blindly went along with that line of reasoning until I did my internal medicine rotation during 3rd year. I wanted to a gun to my head every single morning during that rotation...found out IM did not cater to my interests. During surgical rotations later during 3rd year such as Gen Surg and Gyn, I was lucky to have some good exposure to pathology. I would take specimens down to the frozen room and review slides with pathologists at tumor board meetings. This being a stark contrast to medicine and seeing how cool these pathology folks were, I found my home...I felt that I was destined to be a pathologist. My path rotation early in 4th year was just simply reaffirmation and icing on the cake.
If you like looking at slides and find that the life of a pathologist is something you like a lot, then perhaps pathology is for you
