Second Language Elective vs Extra Research for Competitive Specialties

[VeniVidiViciMD]

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Hello and thank you for reviewing my question. I have the opportunity to enroll in a medical Spanish elective (completion of which will be noted on my transcript and in my dean's letter) that would reduce the time I have for shadowing and research. For highly competitive specialties is medical competency in multiple languages worth a reduction in research output?

 

[Dr. Anonymouss]

Hello and thank you for reviewing my question. I have the opportunity to enroll in a medical Spanish elective (completion of which will be noted on my transcript and in my dean's letter) that would reduce the time I have for shadowing and research. For highly competitive specialties is medical competency in multiple languages worth a reduction in research output?

Questions like these are always open to interpretation depending on who is answering it because it's all opinionated. There is no objective data to base arguments on. But for the sake of playing along, say you are a program director and you have 2 students applying for dermatology. Student A and student B both have similar grades and step scores, but student A has research in dermatology while student B has no research, but can speak a little bit of medical Spanish. Who are you picking?

Knowing another language is a nice addition to an application, but it's not going to get you an interview in and of itself. What is going to get you an interview will be your grades, letters of recommendation, step scores, and research.

 

[Smurfette]

For residency, the language thing is not going to be helpful on your app unless you are applying to a very heavily Spanish speaking location.

For real world/jobs, excluding academics (as only a small percentage of practicing docs are in academics), Spanish fluency trumps research.

 

[operaman]

Research wins in this case both for the reasons states above and this: no elective course will get you to truly functionally fluent in medical Spanish unless you’re already a very strong speaker. You might end up better than the medical student who does an entire Spanish H&P using only the word “dolor,” but not by very much. Certainly not enough that trumps research.

 

[Maskchamp]

Very interesting question. I agree with the above, at least in North America. I'm in Europe and languages are so important and trump so much, more so over letters, grades and etc.

Good luck!