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Hey everyone, just an FYI from a medical resident here who was in your shoes as a pre-med many years ago: If you haven't already, take classes, practice conversations, watch Telenovelas, whatever you have to do to get fluent in Spanish immediately. It doesn't matter what your ethnic background is, and for the vast majority of med schools (usually in urban centers and especially anywhere in the Southwest or Florida), it doesn't matter where you're planning to go-- you have to consider Spanish on a par with classes like orgo or cell bio, as essential for medical school, except even more important in that you will be using Spanish every day in your job.
It's infuriating to me that even today, colleges and med schools are failing to emphasize how essential Spanish linguistic skills are to the students, b/c if you don't speak it well it puts you at a massive disadvantage down the road. It will also make your job orders of magnitude more stressful and frustrating-- you'll be staying often hours later every day than the other residents at the hospital or clinic who can speak Spanish, since you'll be having to spend so much time deciphering communications, hunting around for a nurse or somebody else who can help you interpret, to get basic H&P info for 2/3 of your patients in quite a few urban centers. I learned some Spanish in high school but then mostly forgot it, blew it off as being unimportant when I got to college. This was by far the most idiotic, addle-headed blunder I ever made in my training and I and many of my friends have paid dearly for it-- I've spent many years correcting it (and my Spanish is now fluent after much effort and some years off), but it's been a difficult and altogether unnecessarily arduous road. I've even had acquaintances who've quit their residency in frustration, which is an awful disaster when you've made it this far.
I know all of you at the pre-med stage may not have a strong perception of this yet (I certainly didn't), but on a day-to-day basis at the hospital, you will be unimaginably busy and pressed for time-- trying to squeeze in sometimes dozens of patients-- and efficient communication and information acquisition is absolutely critical, or else you'll be killing yourself with the hours you have to put in. In just about any urban center, or even suburban/rural regions in Southwestern states, Florida or Illinois, a majority of your patients will likely be Spanish-speaking if you have any kind of significant patient contact (and remember, even if you want to do something like radiology, you will have to do an internship in something like Internal Medicine).
If you can't talk directly to such a large number of your patients, you will be absolutely miserable, and your residency-- not to mention your ward rotations as a student in medical school-- will be almost unbearable. Colleges and med-schools haven't remotely caught up with this fact and it doesn't get nearly enough emphasis when your advisors sit down with you to discuss the skills you need to acquire. IMHO, Spanish classes can help but are rather inadequate-- to get good at conversational and rapid written Spanish, it's best to practice conversation as much as you can in a real-world setting, outside of the classroom.
There are some classes that can be valuable, e.g. the "professional Spanish" classes at some universities in which you use Spanish as a medium for business, law, scientific communication in an official context, that sort of thing. Sign up for these as fast as you can if available, or if not, heckle your administrators and professors to start offering them.
However, as a rule, the fluent Spanish you need has to be a life skill that you treat as something more fundamental than any class. In fact, you'll be more interesting if you take classes in another language, e.g. French or German, or something like Hindi or Chinese, while treating Spanish as a "life skill" that you pick up in your daily activities-- conversing in Spanish with native speakers as much as you can, taking a year or a semester and working in Latin America, conversing in Spanish with your friends at a restaurant or while rollerblading, paying your bills in Spanish, reading Spanish books/magazines or watching Spanish movies or telenovelas on TV, whatever it takes. (FWIW, I found watching Spanish movies/TV with subtitles to be very helpful.) You basically have to consider Spanish to be an essential medium of communication at formal as well as informal levels-- that's the only mindset that will prime your brain to get fluent in Spanish to the level you'll need when you enter the wards.
Remember that it's not just your work schedule that will be adversely affected if you lack Spanish skills-- if you can't effectively communicate with such a large number of your patients, and especially if you do a "chart H&P" and wind up being corrected during rounds by e.g. a Spanish-speaking nurse who has communicated directly with the patient, you look very bad in front of everybody, and you'll repeatedly have this sort of painful experience. (Also, never ever use family members and especially kids as ad hoc interpreters for your patients-- this has led to many disastrous medical errors and is not looked upon favorably.) Additionally, you have to take extra time not only for yourself but for the team in making clinical decisions, and you cost the hospital a ton of much-needed money if you have to rely on so much extra assistance.
For other languages you can make do with interpreters, but Spanish is in a special class as a basically must-have skill. Also remember, as one of my law-inclined friends reminded me-- in Southwestern states like Arizona, Texas, California, New Mexico as well as Florida, Spanish has official status and legal protections owing to a whole series of treaties that the USA signed in the 19th century, so there especially Spanish proficiency is an essential long-term skill. But even outside of these states, and especially in urban regions just about anywhere in United States, the language is a must. Spanish fluency is a big plus at med schools and especially at residency programs in the admissions process, but above all, it's just one of those things that you need to function in your job.
If you have little brothers/sisters/nieces/nephews/cousins even thinking about medicine (or a variety of other fields like law, business, accounting or marketing for that matter), drum it into their minds that they have to speak Spanish as comfortably as they do English-- they'll thank you down the road.
Also, if you're from an immigrant family from e.g. India or China or Korea (yours truly being among you), and you have family back home thinking of coming to the US and going the medical route like so many of us-- tell them to sign up for Spanish classes at the schools back home and practice immediately. I know there aren't as many opportunities to practice Spanish out there, but you can do things like e.g. spending a couple years working or studying in Spain or Latin America, to give yourself a necessary edge. I even had a cousin from Tamil Nadu province in India-- props to any other Tough and Truckin' Tamils out there 😎 -- who went to Chile to work for a couple years and get fluent in Spanish prior to his planned move to the US, but liked it so much that he wound up formally immigrating to and permanently settling around Santiago in Chile instead. (Hard to blame him after visiting the country-- those Andean locales are gorgeous beyond description.) He's now married to a Chilean woman and with kids-- and hoping to hit it up and hang out with any other Desis planning to go the South America route. 😉
This is just a helpful FYI b/c I don't want anyone to make the same blunders that I and so many others did. As I said, the schools haven't nearly caught up to the reality on the ground for residents, but it's gonna be increasingly tough and even awful for you if you don't have Spanish skills. Get fluent in that language any way you can, and make sure that anyone else near and dear to you manages to do the same.
It's infuriating to me that even today, colleges and med schools are failing to emphasize how essential Spanish linguistic skills are to the students, b/c if you don't speak it well it puts you at a massive disadvantage down the road. It will also make your job orders of magnitude more stressful and frustrating-- you'll be staying often hours later every day than the other residents at the hospital or clinic who can speak Spanish, since you'll be having to spend so much time deciphering communications, hunting around for a nurse or somebody else who can help you interpret, to get basic H&P info for 2/3 of your patients in quite a few urban centers. I learned some Spanish in high school but then mostly forgot it, blew it off as being unimportant when I got to college. This was by far the most idiotic, addle-headed blunder I ever made in my training and I and many of my friends have paid dearly for it-- I've spent many years correcting it (and my Spanish is now fluent after much effort and some years off), but it's been a difficult and altogether unnecessarily arduous road. I've even had acquaintances who've quit their residency in frustration, which is an awful disaster when you've made it this far.
I know all of you at the pre-med stage may not have a strong perception of this yet (I certainly didn't), but on a day-to-day basis at the hospital, you will be unimaginably busy and pressed for time-- trying to squeeze in sometimes dozens of patients-- and efficient communication and information acquisition is absolutely critical, or else you'll be killing yourself with the hours you have to put in. In just about any urban center, or even suburban/rural regions in Southwestern states, Florida or Illinois, a majority of your patients will likely be Spanish-speaking if you have any kind of significant patient contact (and remember, even if you want to do something like radiology, you will have to do an internship in something like Internal Medicine).
If you can't talk directly to such a large number of your patients, you will be absolutely miserable, and your residency-- not to mention your ward rotations as a student in medical school-- will be almost unbearable. Colleges and med-schools haven't remotely caught up with this fact and it doesn't get nearly enough emphasis when your advisors sit down with you to discuss the skills you need to acquire. IMHO, Spanish classes can help but are rather inadequate-- to get good at conversational and rapid written Spanish, it's best to practice conversation as much as you can in a real-world setting, outside of the classroom.
There are some classes that can be valuable, e.g. the "professional Spanish" classes at some universities in which you use Spanish as a medium for business, law, scientific communication in an official context, that sort of thing. Sign up for these as fast as you can if available, or if not, heckle your administrators and professors to start offering them.
However, as a rule, the fluent Spanish you need has to be a life skill that you treat as something more fundamental than any class. In fact, you'll be more interesting if you take classes in another language, e.g. French or German, or something like Hindi or Chinese, while treating Spanish as a "life skill" that you pick up in your daily activities-- conversing in Spanish with native speakers as much as you can, taking a year or a semester and working in Latin America, conversing in Spanish with your friends at a restaurant or while rollerblading, paying your bills in Spanish, reading Spanish books/magazines or watching Spanish movies or telenovelas on TV, whatever it takes. (FWIW, I found watching Spanish movies/TV with subtitles to be very helpful.) You basically have to consider Spanish to be an essential medium of communication at formal as well as informal levels-- that's the only mindset that will prime your brain to get fluent in Spanish to the level you'll need when you enter the wards.
Remember that it's not just your work schedule that will be adversely affected if you lack Spanish skills-- if you can't effectively communicate with such a large number of your patients, and especially if you do a "chart H&P" and wind up being corrected during rounds by e.g. a Spanish-speaking nurse who has communicated directly with the patient, you look very bad in front of everybody, and you'll repeatedly have this sort of painful experience. (Also, never ever use family members and especially kids as ad hoc interpreters for your patients-- this has led to many disastrous medical errors and is not looked upon favorably.) Additionally, you have to take extra time not only for yourself but for the team in making clinical decisions, and you cost the hospital a ton of much-needed money if you have to rely on so much extra assistance.
For other languages you can make do with interpreters, but Spanish is in a special class as a basically must-have skill. Also remember, as one of my law-inclined friends reminded me-- in Southwestern states like Arizona, Texas, California, New Mexico as well as Florida, Spanish has official status and legal protections owing to a whole series of treaties that the USA signed in the 19th century, so there especially Spanish proficiency is an essential long-term skill. But even outside of these states, and especially in urban regions just about anywhere in United States, the language is a must. Spanish fluency is a big plus at med schools and especially at residency programs in the admissions process, but above all, it's just one of those things that you need to function in your job.
If you have little brothers/sisters/nieces/nephews/cousins even thinking about medicine (or a variety of other fields like law, business, accounting or marketing for that matter), drum it into their minds that they have to speak Spanish as comfortably as they do English-- they'll thank you down the road.
Also, if you're from an immigrant family from e.g. India or China or Korea (yours truly being among you), and you have family back home thinking of coming to the US and going the medical route like so many of us-- tell them to sign up for Spanish classes at the schools back home and practice immediately. I know there aren't as many opportunities to practice Spanish out there, but you can do things like e.g. spending a couple years working or studying in Spain or Latin America, to give yourself a necessary edge. I even had a cousin from Tamil Nadu province in India-- props to any other Tough and Truckin' Tamils out there 😎 -- who went to Chile to work for a couple years and get fluent in Spanish prior to his planned move to the US, but liked it so much that he wound up formally immigrating to and permanently settling around Santiago in Chile instead. (Hard to blame him after visiting the country-- those Andean locales are gorgeous beyond description.) He's now married to a Chilean woman and with kids-- and hoping to hit it up and hang out with any other Desis planning to go the South America route. 😉
This is just a helpful FYI b/c I don't want anyone to make the same blunders that I and so many others did. As I said, the schools haven't nearly caught up to the reality on the ground for residents, but it's gonna be increasingly tough and even awful for you if you don't have Spanish skills. Get fluent in that language any way you can, and make sure that anyone else near and dear to you manages to do the same.
@ "no"
