The stereotypes are supposed to be funny. You'll laugh, hard, the first time you meet an ortho who is actually large, muscular, cavemannish and brospeaking. Because you'll only meet maybe one or two in your life. Most orthos can do a fine and funny imitation of that stereotype. What's the purpose of the heart? To get ancef into the bones.
As a freshly minted FM intern, I like to throw out "let's burn some sage" and "that'll be 5 duck eggs please" to make fun of the FM stereotype. Which gets a laugh from maybe 20% of my colleagues. The rest don't give a crap about the FM stereotype. In my residency we have conservatives, progressives, religious, crunchy, moms & dads, old farts, true intellectuals, biz people, systems people, sports people, extremely quiet people, extremely fashionable people, people actively changing the world for the better, people still playing as much xbox as they can, etc. And we just have 30 residents.
Huge country. 3000+ new FM interns every year. 500+ FM programs. The only bigger specialty is IM. Some FM residencies are at universities - and you bet they care about board scores and pubs. Some are at "community" hospitals that are so tightly integrated with a med school or research institution that they should be considered academic. Some are at free clinics, and you get shipped out to hospitals for your inpatient rotations. Some are in towns with populations under 30,000. Some are in Manhattan. Some are 100% Southern Baptist. Some include Ayurveda. Some are hugely popular and competitive because of location or what have you, and they're filled with AOA MDs from Ivy's with 260's. Some are 4 years long and/or have very well defined emphases.
Here's the thing. If you want to do well in the FM match, and you want your residency to challenge and energize your vocation, then be actually, legitimately interested in FM based on hard-won perspective from real-life experiences with families and illness and health. If you don't really want FM, you might as well do IM or Peds or Path. Don't just go FM if your scores are crap. Or if you just want to get out of residency in 3 years. Or you just want to be in a particular location. There are plenty of FM matches who don't actually legitimately want to practice primary care as a family med doc, maybe they picked it because they thought they wouldn't have to work too hard, or maybe they didn't match what they really wanted (Obgyn, EM, Ortho). Pretty much anybody who goes after FM will match, will graduate, will practice. Same with IM. Same with Peds. There are plenty of people who aren't defined by their specialty choice. Most people aren't. (I pretty much am. I pretty much don't ever stop thinking about disparity alleviation, process improvement, LARCs, yesterday's patients, am I gonna get some intubations, should I do a fellowship, etc. I pretty much give an actual crap.)
I can't tell if you have a real desire to practice family medicine, or if you can't see past the process of getting a residency. Maybe both?
Here are some activity clusters that could help legitimize (or kill) an FM aspiration, and/or help make FM interviews more fun, if you have a couple years to fill:
- anything involving a free clinic
- anything involving the underserved ie undocumented, incarcerated, the rez, homeless etc
- anything involving public health
- anything involving coaching, training, sports, PT, yoga
- almost nothing outside the US (because unless you have lived and worked in a developing country, you'll punk out the first time you get malaria)
- anything where a community goes nuts for its own health like Cyclobia or farmers markets or rails-to-trails 0r Blue Zones
- anything involving women & children & family planning & prenatal care
- anything involving prevention of disease or survivorship of disease
- anything involving the politics, economics or sociology of primary care
- anything involving low income access to healthcare such as ACA navigation, Medicaid signups, SSI, RAM clinics
- learn Spanish or Mandarin or Arabic
- anything involving chronic disease management, practice management, managed care
- conferences & SIGs for STFM, AAFP if you want to do academic med
- anything involving new primary care delivery models such as IORA, JenCare, DPC etc
Hope that helps. Good luck!