i may not be a medical student yet, but i was wandering, when do you decide on what residency you want to do.
Highly variable. Some people go into medical school knowing. Some change their mind, some keep it. Less decide during preclinical years one and two (often times through "interest groups" activities that let them experience the field). Most choose in their clinical years, three and four. A few don't decide until after medical school, applying to transitional year programs that allow them to decide later.
does the match list really mess up your chances if your deciding on another residency?
Not usually. If your school has never produced a neurosurgeon before, nothings going to stop you from being the first one. Nobodies going to look at your schools match list and say "80% of their graduates go into FM/Peds/IM...he obviously can't be a Radiologist!"
what year do you decide on residency and how do you know if u qualify. thanks alot
First, you decide on what field you want to do (see before). Then you can start working on making a list of programs you're interested in. During fourth year you send out applications for interviews and thus starts a year long process of invitations, you ranking programs, programs ranking you, eventually culminating in the "match" in the spring where they tell you what your'e going to be doing next year and where.
To figure if you qualify, the NRMP (people who run the match) publish information on the average grades, board scores, ranks, honors, research background etc. for people who succesfully match in a field. So, let's say you got your sites set on Emergency Medicine, you pull up the info on Emergency Medicine and see how you compare. If you're competitive, you apply for competitive programs. If you're not, you try to interview as many places as possible to match somewhere.
Just to warn you, some of the crazy competitive fields (Plastics Surgery, Dermatology, Radiation Oncology) tend to be so competitive that people will begin planning how to make their application look better prior to match in that field earlier than some other people have even decided on a specialty.
