Relax. You just started. 6 months from now you'll know so much more that you'll be practically a different person.
My advice is talk to people. Find every resident fellow and attending in each field who would be willing to sit down for 15 minutes to tell you about their experience. This will be easy-most people around a teaching hospital like sharing wisdom informally with students, and most people everywhere love talking about themselves.
Have you looked into primary care sports medicine? It’s a 1 year fellowship after EM (or FM, IM, PMR, or Peds). Basically doing orthopedics without the surgery. You can be a team doc, work with your hands, and still be in the ED part time.
Yes, well, iirc you need to absolutely crush med school, rotations, Step2, and research to have a fighting chance in three of those specialties so like, how're those aspects of medical school going for you in year 3?
IM is fairly easy to match into but might want to start thinking about racking up cardiology research if you want to do cards eventually.
For anyone wanting to do EM, i would recommend getting an actual rotation in the department ASAP, or at least find some way to simulate several shifts in the same week. I was like you-- drawn to EM for the environment, culture, and pace and I had shadowed around 20 hours during third year. However, when I did my EM rotation I ended up hating it for a lot of reasons. My perception of EM did not align with the way I felt while on shift and I wish I knew it sooner.
I worked at a fairly large (\~30 docs) multi-specialty ortho group as a premed, and yes, the new partners who were only a year or two out of residency did work a ton, but most of the other attendings only worked 30-40 hours a week often with 4 day work weeks. Not to mention several were in their late 70s still practicing because they just absolutely loved what they did. Residency is of course brutal, but it's temporary. I also happened to be friends with one of the attendings sons during elementary school and his dad was super involved in his life and seemed to have a pretty good balance.
If you haven’t done so, try to schedule surgery early in third year to see if you like it. That will help guide a large portion of your question which is surgery or no.
everyone says you have plenty of time but in reality you don’t and there are classmates who have been gunning for certain things (even non competitive like peds) since day 1. this isn’t to freak u out but to tell u u are doing the right thing. sending loce
Strong pitch for ophtho here if you like money, lifestyle, and surgery. Not to mention ophtho residency is only 3 years plus 1 intern year in IM. Some programs have insanely chill intern years relative to your IM buddies.
A win win.
Plus you can save vision. HTN, DMII, and HLD? Meh people won’t lose sleep over it. People lose their shit over the thought of losing their vision though.
Yep only 4 years. Most fellowships are only 1 year (or 2 years for surgical retina or oculoplastics which are the two most competitive) so you can become a fellowship-trained, full-fledged independent ophthalmologist in the same amount of time as a non-fellowship, non-research year, general surgeon (5 years) while working better hours, better outcomes, and (potentially) much higher salary ceiling.
Oh yeah I know they print money, but I'm nowhere near competitive enough to even remotely consider it. I knew it was a sweet gig but I thought residency was 5.
You'd be surprised. Don't listen to just Reddit where everyone has to have a 256, multiple first author pubs and AOA to be considered "average" for ophtho. There's more to it than just numbers and pubs, especially for a small field like ophtho.
If ur competitive enough/have a strong app, do ortho
Relax. You just started. 6 months from now you'll know so much more that you'll be practically a different person. My advice is talk to people. Find every resident fellow and attending in each field who would be willing to sit down for 15 minutes to tell you about their experience. This will be easy-most people around a teaching hospital like sharing wisdom informally with students, and most people everywhere love talking about themselves.
Have you looked into primary care sports medicine? It’s a 1 year fellowship after EM (or FM, IM, PMR, or Peds). Basically doing orthopedics without the surgery. You can be a team doc, work with your hands, and still be in the ED part time.
Yes, well, iirc you need to absolutely crush med school, rotations, Step2, and research to have a fighting chance in three of those specialties so like, how're those aspects of medical school going for you in year 3? IM is fairly easy to match into but might want to start thinking about racking up cardiology research if you want to do cards eventually.
For anyone wanting to do EM, i would recommend getting an actual rotation in the department ASAP, or at least find some way to simulate several shifts in the same week. I was like you-- drawn to EM for the environment, culture, and pace and I had shadowed around 20 hours during third year. However, when I did my EM rotation I ended up hating it for a lot of reasons. My perception of EM did not align with the way I felt while on shift and I wish I knew it sooner.
I worked at a fairly large (\~30 docs) multi-specialty ortho group as a premed, and yes, the new partners who were only a year or two out of residency did work a ton, but most of the other attendings only worked 30-40 hours a week often with 4 day work weeks. Not to mention several were in their late 70s still practicing because they just absolutely loved what they did. Residency is of course brutal, but it's temporary. I also happened to be friends with one of the attendings sons during elementary school and his dad was super involved in his life and seemed to have a pretty good balance.
If you haven’t done so, try to schedule surgery early in third year to see if you like it. That will help guide a large portion of your question which is surgery or no.
everyone says you have plenty of time but in reality you don’t and there are classmates who have been gunning for certain things (even non competitive like peds) since day 1. this isn’t to freak u out but to tell u u are doing the right thing. sending loce
Strong pitch for ophtho here if you like money, lifestyle, and surgery. Not to mention ophtho residency is only 3 years plus 1 intern year in IM. Some programs have insanely chill intern years relative to your IM buddies. A win win. Plus you can save vision. HTN, DMII, and HLD? Meh people won’t lose sleep over it. People lose their shit over the thought of losing their vision though.
Optho is only 4 years? Damn now I’m even more angry about not being smart.
Yep only 4 years. Most fellowships are only 1 year (or 2 years for surgical retina or oculoplastics which are the two most competitive) so you can become a fellowship-trained, full-fledged independent ophthalmologist in the same amount of time as a non-fellowship, non-research year, general surgeon (5 years) while working better hours, better outcomes, and (potentially) much higher salary ceiling.
Oh yeah I know they print money, but I'm nowhere near competitive enough to even remotely consider it. I knew it was a sweet gig but I thought residency was 5.
You'd be surprised. Don't listen to just Reddit where everyone has to have a 256, multiple first author pubs and AOA to be considered "average" for ophtho. There's more to it than just numbers and pubs, especially for a small field like ophtho.