Shadowing length vs duration

[NP545]

I'm shadowing doctors with various specialties for one full workday per specialty, ex: 9-5 (8 hours) for about 6-7 specialties to total ~50 hours. However others I know are shadowing the same doctor 10 hours a week for 2-3 months. What's better- shadowing several doctors for short term or one or two doctors for a long time?

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[karayaa]

They're both good, in different way. Your way, you get shallow exposure to many different specialties. Their way, they get more in-depth exposure to fewer specialities.
The best, obvi, would be to do lots of specialties, each for a long period of time.

edit - i will say that one day is probably not enough to get past your first impression - which could be very skewed. It's also a very small perspective on their full scope of practice.

 

[Time Table]

I did a few days for about 10 hours or so per day for each of the specialty. I'd say that after 30-40 hours per specialty, you should have a good grasp of what they do in their daily lives.

 

[karayaa]

I did a few days for about 10 hours or so per day for each of the specialty. I'd say that after 30-40 hours per specialty, you should have a good grasp of what they do in their daily lives.

Depending on the speciality, you might need more/less time.
If it's a surgical specialty, you'd need more time because you need to see surgery+clinic - if it's a focused specialty, like Allergy, it might take less time because the range of problems is so narrow - if it's a broad specialty, like Family Med, or Emergency Med, it'd take more time, for the opposite reason.

40hrs/a full week is probably the saturation point for learning about the specialty, but it can be nice to extend past that if the doc is good and friendly, just to learn more about medicine (this is an unrealized goal of mine haha)

 

[kyamh]

If you are only choosing a specific time to come and shadow (only a few hours at a time), the physician may be inviting you at "interesting" times so you may not get fully exposed to the boring and ugly sides of the job. I always tried to shadow for a full day and I would ask about how this day was or was not typical for that particular physician. The point is to understand what you are getting yourself into - there are many ways to do that and these ways are a little different applicant to applicant.