greenbean said:
I think I am going insane
and it is because I am currently towards the end of my 3rd year of med school and I still have don't know what specialty i should go into
as for the rotations i have done: medicine, surgery(ortho,ophtho,gen), neuro, ob/gyn. I can only cross off certain things that don't appeal to me: rads, derm, gen. medicine
i like the or, but i dont like the lifestyle of gen surg or ortho; ophtho clinic put me into a coma. i like parts of medcine but not gen. medicine; endless rounding drove me nuts. neuro was interesting but i still was troubled by just diagnosing pt maladies. and ob/gyn: the l & d nurses really made life unbearable, are they like that everywhere?
i really am very confused right now and i keep thinking about the pro's and con's of every single field. my dad wants me to go into ob b'c of the shortage within the field and b'c i liked surgery . i dont know if i should make a decision based in that way.
do u have any good advice/suggestions for me? appreciate it, thanks 😱
Although the economics of a field (eg, salary, need for doctors, etc) are good to think about, it isnt something that should be the most important since the market can change significantly. For example, certain specialties may be in a much bigger or smaller need 10 years from now and certain specialties may see huge shifts in reimbursement over the years. These things are nice to think about once you have are trying to decide between a few things that you can see yourself enjoy doing everyday.
One important part of the decision process is deciding if you like surgery. If you absolutely love the OR and want to be there for hours every day, then gen surg, ortho, cardiothoracic are things to think about. If you really like the OR but like being in clinic as well think ENT, urology, ophtho. I find there are a lot of things that are very boring (like ophtho clinic is for you right now) when you are just observing. If you were actually using the ophtho toys yourself and dilating their eyes and looking in and using all the lasers and stuff, it may be fascinating for you. For example, I know people who hated radiology elective because they just watched other people read films. But when they worked with an attedning who challenged the student to read the films themselves, they loved it and chose to go into it. For me, I love pediatric cardiology. I couldnt imagine doing anything else with my life. But the part of the elective I hated most was when we would go to the echo lab or cath lab and just watch the attednings do a cath or read an echo. But I know once I learn enough to do these things and do them for myself, I will love it. So what I am saying is if you like the eye and its diseases, do not rule it out just because you werent given an active role in clinic.
And about OB...I loved OB. The gyn part was less appealing to me. Regardless, it is great for someone who really enjoys both medicine and surgery. The wide array of career paths is more than any other specialty with the exception of maybe internal medicine, although some would argue OB/GYN offers more diverse opportunities. There are people in my class who chose OB/GYN for that single reason. They couldnt decide between medicine and surgery so they chose OB/GYN because it offered such a wide array of subspecialty choices. You can be a generalist and do both low risk OB and gyn, you can be strictly a surgeon with urogyn or gyn onc, you can manage high risk acute issues in maternal-fetal medicine, you can have a low stress office job by doing infertility. And yes the L&D nurses were a pain at my school too. But they werent like that to the residents or attendings. They hated the medical students mainly. They hated the guys and made them feel like perverts for staring at their patients' vaginas while they were given birth and they looked at the girls like their was some unspoken power struggle. So dont let that get you down.
Best of luck. You have a few months still so do not sweat it. The only adive I would give is that if you have any thoughts at all that you may want to do ophtho, uro, or ent, try and get on some research now or start schmoozing with the attendings. These are tough fileds to get into so you could use any edge you can get. Also, uro and ophtho are early matches so you will need to get exposure late third year or very early fourth year to get letters and away eletives.
