How to find a GOOD doctor to shadow?

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czf

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Some may ask why I feel the need to shadow when I'm already accepted to a US med school. Let me explain it first. First of all, I'm Canadian and shadowing is not legally allowed here. I only started shadowing since April this year and I had to drive all the way down to Buffalo NY to shadow. I've done it only three times so far. Also, none of my family members are remotely doctor-related so my exposure to this field is rather lacking. Therefore I would like to make it up through shadowing. Lastly, the US healthcare system is vastly different from the Canadian healthcare system and I would like to know more about your system (insurance etc.) by shadowing.

Here is my plan for M1/2. Please give me some feedback if it's not realistic. I plan to devote an entire afternoon per week to shadow. But I don't want to shadow the same doctor for two years. Instead, if possible, I would like to shadow one doctor from different specialties, each for around two months, so that I can get exposure to different specialties.

I believe it might be easier to find shadowing opportunities as a med student. However, I would like to find a physician that can truly teach me something. Therefore I would like to ask for any tips on how to find a great mentor. For your information, I found my current shadowing mentor by sending out cold emails to 50 doctors in that hospital and he was the only one who replied. But I would assume that there could be a better way to find mentors than sending out cold emails which is a bit risky (what if you end up with a doctor who has an abusive personality...?). I'm going to call the pre-med advising office tomorrow at the school that I'm going to attend and perhaps shoot another email to a current med student. Hopefully they can hook me up with someone great. I contacted the admission office but they just gave me a link to the career offfice which is kind of useless...

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Wait until you're in school before you seek out a mentor. Then apply these two complex steps:

-Identify someone you want to emulate.
-Communicate desire to learn from that someone.

As an aside your post seems anxiety ridden. Calm down, med school will be fine.
 
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Wait until you're in school before you seek out a mentor. Then apply these two complex steps:

-Identify someone you want to emulate.
-Communicate desire to learn from that someone.

As an aside your post seems anxiety ridden. Calm down, med school will be fine.

Do you care to elaborate how to "seek out" such mentors? I mean, you go to class, you volunteer a bit, maybe do some research, and I just don't see how you can expose yourself to meet great doctors. Also it's not like picking a research supervisor where you can go to their lab homepage and everything they do is written out. You can also pubmed search the lab to get an estimate of the productivity of the lab. Of course with research you still need to make sure that the PI is not an dingus by meeting the PI face to face but still you can contact a selected subgroup before asking for an interviews. With doctor shadowing though, I don't really see any ways to do that on the internet.
 
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Presumably you will have an adviser, no?
 
Breathe. Assuming your school has a hospital, there's going to be an entire building full of physicians who are there to teach you. Obviously some will be more willing than others, but that's just something you have to feel out. Also, does your med school have a scribe program? You'll get locked into one specialty, but that'll give you a great sense of how things are done. Lastly, don't worry about any of this until you actually start school. I would be a little put off by an incoming M1 cold calling me.
 
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