MappedCon presented by Blueprint Test Prep 2024 is this Friday, October 26, 925 Eastern. I'm starting the day in my track, the pre-med track, planting the seed of your personal statement. We have three tracks going all day long and a couple hours of amazing exhibitors where you can learn more about their programs. Again, MappedCon presented by Blueprint Test Prep, October 26, register for free. It's a virtual event and all the sessions will be up after. So even if you can't make it live, go register and get access to the sessions. Go to MappedCon.com right now, register. That's M-A-P-P-D-C-O-N.com. If you're applying to medical school in 2022 to start medical school in 2023, join me Wednesday or Thursday, Wednesday night at 9.30 p.m. Eastern or Thursday at 11 a.m. Eastern at premedworkshop.com. Go register today. I'm going to show you how to tell your story in your application. Again, that's premedworkshop.com. If you are applying to medical school in 2022, be there or be square. Hello and welcome back to the medical school HQ podcast. This is the place to learn how to excel as a premed student, learn what it takes to survive medical school, and turn your dreams of becoming a physician into reality. We're bringing you the most unbiased, honest, accurate, and up-to-date information available online today. As always, my name is Ryan Gray, and I'm excited to host another great podcast for you today. And it's been a while, but I have my awesome co-host back in the "studio" with me. Hello, everybody. Allison, I think you say hello every time the same way. Well, I am the same person. You are. You are. But there's something different about you this time since you recorded last time with us. We got some good information. We did. About a test that you took. We did. I passed my neurology boards. I am officially board-certified in neurology. Yay. Awesome. So you guys out there on the Twitter versus Facebook world, if you want to say congrats to Allison, you can do that. We'll have a bunch of information at the end of the show today on how to get in contact with us and some other key information, exciting information that we'll have to share with you later after the main topic of our show, which we'll get to in one second. I do want to thank the three people that left us amazing five-star ratings and reviews we had. I don't know where people get these usernames from, but this one says hoping I look good and white. So it's either a female that wants to get married and wants to look good in a white dress or somebody who wants to wear a white coat. I'm guessing it's the white coat. Okay. They say great podcast. Lakers 1040 says it's a pre-med must and scalpel says, "I wish I could give it 500 stars." Awesome. Thank you guys. I wonder they can create 50 different usernames. Is that math right? No. That might take a while. No, math's right. 100. Well, the sentiment is very appreciated. All right. So amazing five-star ratings and reviews. If you haven't left us a five-star rating yet or a review, please do so. The way iTunes works is the more ratings, the more reviews that we get the more visibility that we get in iTunes. And so other students out there that were like you and out there looking on iTunes for something or searching in the app store for something and our podcast just popped up, that popped up for you because somebody else left a rating and review. So if you can do the same thing and pay it forward, you can do that at medicalschoolhq.net/itunes. So Allison. Yes, Ryan. What are we talking about today? Today we are talking about how to pick a medical specialty. Yeah. So we came up with five pretty key things that we thought of that we think are instrumental in kind of forming your path and choosing your specialty. Yeah. And I think that this topic applies to anybody out there who is either already in the medical profession as a medical student and all of you out there also who are premed because you it's never really too early to start thinking about what kind of doctor you might want to be. And I think some people first realize that they might want to become a doctor because they really love their pediatrician or they have some kind of sports injury or some experience in their life and they start thinking about a medical specialty or surgical specialty even before they've entered high school. So it's never too early. So I think it's a topic that can appeal to everyone. Yeah. And I think you started talking about our first one, which is when should people, students be thinking about what they want to do? They know they want to be a doctor, but when should little Johnny or little Jill start thinking about I want to be an orthopedic surgeon, I want to be an obstetrician. So my take on it is that it's never too early. I think that people come to the realization of what field they want to pursue at all different times. There are people who like Ryan had an injury when he was young and that sparked his interest in orthopedic surgery specifically. And so when he was applying to medical school, when he started medical school, he knew that orthopedic surgery was what he wanted period. And I've talked to lots of people over the years who've said, Oh, I really want to be a pediatrician and really they're in high school. So it's never too early to have those interests in your mind. I think you as you get into medical school, and then later on, there does become a point where you have to decide. So early in fourth year is probably the very latest that you want to be coming to that decision. I remember in our medical fourth year of medical school, right? Right. Right. Yes. Not senior year of college. Correct. Yeah. Because you do have to apply for residency and those applications open up some time around September. So you really at some point, you really do have to make the decision. That said though, there were some people who dual apply. There was a guy in our med school class who applied to OBGYN and I think family med. So sometimes people really push out that decision as far as they possibly can. If you look at the data for the residency applications, many people apply to multiple specialties. And I wonder if that hurts them during their interviews. I wonder too, a good friend of mine actually dual applied and family med and internal med. And you might ask, well, how did he rank them? And ranking is a topic for a whole nother day. But he basically did like AB, AB. He would rank a family med program and then an OB program and then a family med and OB. And when it came down to it, sorry, it was family med and internal med. And when it came down to it, he ended up matching an internal med and he was bummed. And so later on in residency, he ended up switching. Anyway, it's kind of a... Maybe we should talk to him and figure out why he did that. What was his mindset? I think a lot of people look at it as a really crucial decision. It's a life-changing decision you're going to make. And some people just come up to it at the end and get really freaked out because they just aren't sure. But I think the thing to remember is that it's never too late. Medicine, there's something so beautiful in the field of medicine, which is that you can change. You can switch to something later on. So it's never really too late and it's never too early. But I think the prime time when most people figure out what specialty they want to pursue, that's in your third year. And we'll talk a little bit about what you're exposed to in your third year and a little bit. But I think my biggest advice to students is, again, if you have an interest early, try to explore that early. If you think that you could be interested in OB/GYN or orthopedics or whatever it may be, explore it in first year, if you can. Yeah. I'll go back to talk about myself for a minute, which I love to do. Just kidding. You'd mentioned earlier that I hurt myself playing sports and got interested in ortho, that stereotypical story that people tell in a personal statement. The experience that I had, where I went into medical school, I applied to medical school, I went through my pre-med path, I knew I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon the whole time. I applied for orthopedic surgery for my residency. I'd never changed my mind. I think that was bad. Why is that? I don't think I went into every rotation with an open mind. I don't think I went through my pre-clinical years with an open mind either. Looking back on it now, I sat through pharmacology, learning medications to treat reflux, and I'm like, "Why the heck do I need to know this?" I think you cried through pharmacology because you hated it so much. That's a different story. Maybe we'll do a podcast all the time trying to cry to medical school. You just hated memorizing all those drugs anyway. Keeping an open mind is 100 percent probably the biggest take-home message that I think we can drive home today. You may know in the bottom of your heart from head to toe that you were born to be a gynecologist. That's just what you wanted to do. I don't know why you wanted to be a gynecologist, but that's just what you want to do. There's nothing else that you want to do. But if you go into your pre-clinical years studying different medications, studying different symptoms with that thought behind everything that you're doing, then you're going to be in a disadvantage because you're not going to be happy because you're going to be frustrated. Why am I learning this when I want to be a gynecologist? You're going to go through your rotations. Why am I doing this? I just want to be a gynecologist. Yeah, very true. I agree wholeheartedly on that. I think that one of the things that's so important about third year in medical school is the exposure you get to different fields. The point of third year is not just so that you can figure out which field of medicine or surgery you want to go into. It's to really teach you something very important. A lot of things about a lot of those fields. If you really siphon yourself off as I've already decided this is what I'm doing, not only are you losing out on the opportunity to figure out that, gee, you might actually be much more interested in something else, but you also are probably not going to be showing up as interested in other things. Residents are going to say, oh, well, yeah, that student wants to go into a guide. They don't really care about internal medicine. I think there's a tendency for that to reflect poorly on you, for you to just show up as not being as excited or interested in the actual subject matter you're studying. You won't remember things later on in your career. You'd be surprised things that I learned on my general surgery rotation or things that I learned on my OB rotation that I still think back on and help me today, even as a neurologist. It's really, really important for so many reasons to stay open-minded. We've also met lots of people like we were saying who have switched later on. There was someone that Ryan and I met at some point in medical school who had switched from surgery to psych. People who go in thinking something, things can completely change once you actually get your hands dirty and you get real-time exposure to that field as a medical student. So just stay open-minded. There's no harm in it and it can only help. Another reason and another thing to be open-minded about is when you're in the hospital and I'll switch and go to orthopedics. I'm doing an orthopedic rotation at the hospital and seeing what the orthopedic surgeons are doing and we went to school that was affiliated on the same campus as a level one trauma center. The orthopedics that I saw was a lot of trauma, a lot of trauma, a lot of car accidents, motorcycle accidents, a lot of nasty stuff. I came from the mindset of liking more sports medicine, more outpatient stuff. One thing that you need to keep in mind and be open-minded about is while you're going through those rotations in a hospital is realize that that's a very small subset possibly of what your life will look like in the future. If you want to be an orthopedic surgeon, it doesn't have to be in a hospital. You can practice in the community and work in an office setting for a couple days a week and work in a small surgical center for a couple days a week and enjoy your life and never have to step foot in a hospital again other than maybe taking call because you're affiliated with the hospital. There are other things to keep in mind when you're going through those rotations that what you see during that rotation is not specifically what life is going to be like. You need to open up and we'll talk about a little bit more about finding mentors and other people to shadow and some other stuff, but that's another thing to be open-minded about. Absolutely. When I was figuring out what I wanted to, I learned pretty early on that I wanted, that I was interested in neurology, but when it came to my third year rotation, I actually really didn't like the rotation at our medical school. I had done, I had had a fantastic shadowing experience between my first and second year of medical school with a neurologist near where I lived near Boston and fell in love with it, thought it was the best thing ever and it was all outpatient. Then fast forward to my third year rotation and it was all inpatient and it was a very, it was in just such stark contrast to what I had become accustomed to and it was also very depressing, the teaching wasn't great and I had this kind of crisis of faith. Like, is this actually what I want to go into and I was freaking out. Do you remember that? Yeah and I started thinking well maybe I should do internal medicine and I started becoming depressed and I mean internal medicine is fabulous, but I couldn't see myself specializing in any of those fields within internal medicine and I knew I didn't want to do primary care. So I really just had this crisis and what I had to come back to in the end, I had to say, you know what Allison, there's a reason that you fell in love with neurology in the first place. You loved the experience that you had, so you can't pin everything on this one experience during your clinical rotation. You have to remember guys, just like you can have a crappy professor in a course that you have in college or even in medical school, you can have a crappy experience on one of your clinical rotations. So let's say you've been for the last two or three years, you've been saying, oh I just, I want to do ortho, that's it, I'm doing ortho. And then you get to your, an ortho rotation, you decide to do it at your own medical school and it's terrible. Remember that that's one experience, it's three or four weeks long. So I think at the end of the day, to really solidify that in your mind, if you are having this kind of crisis of faith that lots of us go through, experience it elsewhere, try to get as much experience in the field as you can to try to really cement in your mind if it's for you. There's nothing, I think the second biggest take home point to tell people is experience is the best way to figure out whether you want to do something, whether it's the right fit for you. Which leads us right into point number two, is getting exposure as early as you can to start figuring out what you might be interested in. But also, some of these specialties might require some research. A lot of, a lot of specialties are very research heavy and a lot of residencies are research heavy. So if you are going into a super competitive residency and you have little to no research behind you, then you might be able to disadvantage to somebody else. So the earlier that you get exposure to a field and figure out, okay, this is kind of cool. I like this, I think I might like it. Let me, let me go hook up with somebody and see what kind of research is going on and get that exposure and the research opportunities as well. Absolutely. You'll find as a medical student that there are about five core clinical rotations that you have as a third year. And these are pretty much the same everywhere in every medical school throughout the country. The core clinical rotations as a third year med student include internal medicine, general surgery, pediatrics, OBGYN, and psychiatry. Now, if you ask me, every single medical school in the country should also have a neurology rotation. And that's again, another topic for another day, most do, but not all do. Anyhow, neurology and family med are very common ones that you'll find in third year at lots of medical schools throughout the states. And then there are some medical schools who also have emergency medicine and radiology rotations. However, if you are interested in he-monk, so oncology, let's say you want to take care of people who are fighting cancer, let's say you want to be a gastroenterologist or maybe your uncle is a radiation oncologist and you think it would be really great to be a radiation oncologist. As Ryan said, get exposed as early as you can. Don't think that first year is too early. You can, you want to take advantage of any opportunity you can when you're not studying something else to try to get that exposure in. So you can take the summer between first and second year of med school, that golden summer, that last summer you'll ever have off. And that's what I did. I took that time to get exposure to neurology because I thought I didn't want to wait for third year. I wanted to figure out if that was what I wanted to do because I was really interested in it. Did you shadow anywhere else to figure out and see what else you might be interested in before all of this? I'm glad you asked that because the answer is yes. So I also had an interest in emergency medicine, which it's funny because I think about that now and think my goodness why on earth was I interested in emergency medicine. I love my friends who are emergency medicine doctors but my god not for me. But that's exactly how I figured it out. I did a shadowing or I had a shadowing experience. I shadowed at a local hospital, one of the big academic centers in Boston, and worked with two or three different emergency medicine attendings. And I would run around with them as they were seeing cases. And I think I was probably intrigued by the adrenaline rush of it all. And I thought that this could be a really fantastic way to live one's life as a physician on the fly, always running in and out of trauma bays. But when I actually got in there, I found that there were so much time spent in trying to get people admitted to different services or phone calls to consultants all the time. It's not that great, wonderful rush you have. You're running in and out and saving lives here and there and everywhere. There is a lot of that. I mean, for God's sakes, emergency medicine physicians have such an important role to play and they do save lives on a daily basis. But there's a lot that that's not so glamorous about the job as well. And so that summer was such it was a defining moment in my life because I realized through that experience in the ER that EM or emergency medicine was not for me. And then during that same summer, I shadowed a neurologist and figured out that that was actually the career for me. And you can see how someone like me, I am kind of a variety junkie. I love lots of different things. I get really interested in a lot of different things. And so it was really important for me to take that opportunity to really get my hands dirty and be as immersed as possible in those two different environments to figure out what I wanted to do. All right. So we talked a little bit about being open-minded. We talked about getting exposure. Let's talk about some of the nuts and bolts. Number three, how do we do this and actually go through the process of figuring this out? Yes. The how to pick a medical specialty or surgical specialty. So one of the things that I tell people is that if you are someone like me who was a little different than Ryan and was sort of interested in everything, a lot of people will use the process of elimination. They will sit with a checklist and go through all the specialties. And as they progress through medical school, they will start crossing things off. For example, they will go to their psychiatry rotation and see what it's like to be around a psychotic patient. And they may become really freaked out by that experience and say, "Okay, that's it. Psychiatry is not for me." I remember in my third year rotation in psych, actually, one of my peers in my medical school class, there was a situation when a very psychotic patient had to be held down and sedated. And it was extremely kind of traumatic to watch and very troubling for us as students because we hadn't seen that before. And I remember this peer of mine, this colleague, other medical students saying, "That's it. This is not for me." And that's what it is. It's these daily little experiences on the wards. So you just start crossing things off as you go. Yeah. I think that's a good way of doing it. I think there are several... Well, we'll have links to some of our... The funniest kind of algorithms out there that are supposed to help medical students figure out what they should be doing. And it's a whole algorithm. Are you smart? Are you not? Are you good with your hands? Do you like people? Are you crazy? Are you guys? Yeah. Do you have ADD? Yeah. And so we'll have links to some of those algorithms in the show notes, which you can get at medicalschoolhq.net/55, the number is 5-5, as in episode 55. And so we'll have links to those. But there are a couple just big, general things to think about to kind of help you guide your thought processes and what you want to do. And one of the biggest differentiating things is, do you want to be a surgeon or do you want to be a diagnostician? And I think there are some people that love the operating room. I am one of them. I think the one thing that I miss the most, being a flight surgeon in the Air Force, is I miss the operating room. I love being a flight surgeon, but I miss operating. But you can be a surgeon or you can be a diagnostician. And there are some fields where you are both. You have a good kind of a mix of both. But that's one of the biggest questions that you need to ask yourself to begin with. Yeah, it's really important to figure that out. Because while you may have watched house, and it seems like these people just fly in and out of the OR, and then they're in the ER. And people, physicians in practice, are not like house where you can do everything. At some point, you really do have to make a decision. And there are some fields that will lend themselves to having some amount of procedures. So that you're not really in the OR, but you get to do lumbar punctures or parisentices or other kinds of procedures. But for the most part, you're either going to be primarily a diagnostician or primarily a surgeon. And I think that one of the best ways, there are a couple ways to sort of hone in on that and figure out where you fall. For me, it was a little bit clearer pretty early on. Because while I really enjoyed the OR as well, and particularly I loved OB, I have never been someone who has a lot of dexterity, my manual dexterity, my spatial sense. They're not so great. Ryan's are off the charts. And I knew that about myself. And remember everyone, you have to be honest with yourself. This is about the career, the rest of your life. And so even if I was enjoying being the OR, I knew that I was not going to be somebody who felt comfortable. I think working with my hands all the time and relying on dexterity, which I just didn't think was that strong. We've talked to friends of ours who are surgeons. And some people say, "Well, you can train a monkey to do surgery." And even though at the interviews for some surgical subspecialties, and they'll have you try to line up a bunch of marshmallows on top of each other, and they'll be measuring and observing your dexterity at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. There are some people who actually say it does matter. Yeah. I think it's two different questions. One, can you do it? And two, how good are you at doing it? So you'll hear stories of residencies that tell you to sew together two pieces of cheese and see how well you can do it without tearing apart the cheese. And our friend, who's an orthopedic surgeon, who we interviewed for a specialty series for the Academy, he was talking about that, and he's like, "Oh, you can train anybody to do anything. That's not the problem." But there was a new article that just was released to study October 2013 that compared the technical skills of practicing bariatric surgeons and showed that greater skill was associated with fewer post-operative complications and lower rates of re-operation, readmission, and visits to the emergency department. So yes, you might be able to teach somebody to do it, but you still have to be skilled at doing it. And so I'm not going to pick on you, Allison, but you are-- Let's put it this way. Ryan wouldn't come see me if he needed his appendix after while he already had it. Yes, you might be able to take my appendix out. But am I going to do it well? Are you going to leave the rest of the tissue alone around my appendix? I've already had it taken out, so I don't have to worry about that, but that's good. So it's two different questions. Can we teach anybody to be a surgeon? The answer is yes, but how good you will be. And so that's where you have to be honest with yourself and understand where your skills may lie. You do. I think that you have to become a master at your craft, whatever that craft is. And so for me, it wasn't just this whole negative thing that I knew that I wasn't so spatially inclined. That was part of it. But the other thing is that I've always been someone who from a very young age has loved puzzles. I love complex problem solving. I love looking at a really challenging problem and figuring out with just my brain how to solve that problem. And so for me, I knew that I wanted to think diagnostically. I wanted to spend the hours of my day working with, talking with, taking care of people, of patients, and also working at solving problems, at figuring out puzzles. And so neurology, therefore, was actually pretty, that made a lot of sense. Internal medicine could have as well. So if a lot of physicians out there, a lot of medical students do like problem solving and puzzles and math. And so if you're not so spatially inclined, there's a world out there of diagnostic medicine in different fields. And the key then is to hone in on, okay, well, which one of those? So that's a key thing that you all want to figure out at some point. And don't forget, like we were saying that even if you do go into a field like, let's say hematology oncology or nephrology, there are some procedures that you're still going to be able to do. So you're not crossing that off of the list that you won't be able to do any procedures, you're just really, again, settling that ultimate question of, are you going to be spending most of your time using your hands most of your time using your brain? Yeah. So that's the, that's the big tree that you start going down one path or the other. The next thing to think about might be, do you like kids or do you not? Or more importantly, do you like parents? Right. And a lot of us out there love children. I love children love spending time with children. But one thing that I figured out pretty early on was that I didn't want to be taking care of children in a medical way. I didn't want to be treating children as patients. And part of it was the parents. I found that those, some of those encounters with parents can be very challenging. And you end up feeling like you're primarily taking care of the parent who's not the sick one, because you're spending time explaining to them what's going on. And I wanted to have the experience of being able to really explain things to my patients, talk with them in ways that they could understand. And you can't do that so much for a five-year-olds. It's a little bit different. And the five-year-olds can't tell you what hurts and why it hurts. So babies, they can't explain to you where the pain is. They might cry, they might throw their arms up in the ear and scream, but they can't articulate things. And I realized that that was important for me. So that's another thing to really figure out. And the reason is that medicine and surgery come in all different flavors, but you're either again going to be taking care of adults primarily, or children. There is a select residency called MedPeds, which is medicine pediatrics, where you actually train so that you can practice and take care of both adults and children. There's also family medicine, where you take care of sort of the whole family unit. So you may spend time taking care of children, adults, elderly people. But again, for the most part, you want to try to settle that question in your mind. Do you really prefer taking care of children or do you prefer taking care of adults? All right. So that's kids and parents and dealing with those. And then you have, do you like sick people or do you not like sick people? Right. As physicians, you will take care of people who are ill at some point, most likely. But there are-- And we're not talking ill like they have the cold. We're talking ill like the patients that you see in the ICU that have tubes coming out of everything. Right. So you can't get away as a physician, you can't get away with not taking care of anyone who's sick at any point, right? Then you're in the wrong profession. If you don't make illness, you're in the wrong topic. What about prospective medicine? Well, okay, that's true. But at some point, you're probably going to run into a sick person, at least in residency. But what Ryan and I are pointing to, as he said, is really more critically ill people. Because there are some fields in medicine, like pulmonary or critical care medicine, where you will be spending the majority, if not all of your time, taking care of people who are critically ill. They may be intubated, meaning they have a breathing tube in. They're comatose. They're not able to communicate with you. And what you're really dealing with is trying to repair their body because they're not able to really interact with you. So some people really thrive in that environment. They really like that critical illness. People who are really at death's door and you're trying to do whatever you can to save them to prolong their life. They're the most sick people. There are other people who we know who don't like that, who really prefer to take care of people to manage patients who are for the most part well, who come in with that runny nose, that common cold, that earache. Primarily, they're doing fine. So that's something else to figure out for yourself. Again, I think if you go into primary care or preventative medicine, you're still going to run into lots of people who come in who are sick from time to time. But it's that range. It's that contrast. If you're someone who loves people who are super, super sick, you're probably not going to be super excited to be in primary care most of the time. Yeah. And I think along the same lines, if you want to be an oncologist but don't want to deal with dying patients, then you're thinking about everything all wrong. Very true. There are some things to think about along those lines. And then I think one of the big last ones is, are you an adrenaline junkie? Do you love jumping from room to room to room with patient crashing after patient crashing and handling that? Not really. Do you like it? Because I think a lot of people love adrenaline and love the way it makes them feel. But how do you handle that? And can you maintain your composure during those times? So if you do, then working as an emergency room physician in a level one trauma center might be a fantastic job for you. If you don't, but you still like a lot of variety, maybe working in the emergency room in a small community hospital in the middle of nowhere might still be a little fun. So there are some things to think about there as well. Yeah. So really knowing, know thyself, as they say. And actually, Ryan, since you brought up the oncology piece, I just wanted to mention one other thing. I think it's really important as you are thinking about what specialty you want to go into, that you think about the patients you're going to be taking care of and the emotional toll that that can have on you. Because as a neurologist, I can tell you I take care of a lot of people with a lot of really devastating illnesses and a lot of things that we still don't have good treatments for. And I don't think I fully appreciated just how honestly depressing and sad neurology can be at times until I was really heavily invested in it. And don't get me wrong. I love what I do. But you have to be able to think about that. If you're really interested in taking care of patients with cancer, it's the same thing. You need to spend at least a moment or two thinking about the fact that you are going to be seeing a lot of people die, a lot of people struggling, a lot of people feel. Yeah, exactly. A lot of families. Very, very heavy stuff. And if you're someone who takes it home with you and can't really separate it, if you're a big crier, that's okay. I am and, you know, I don't call it crying though. You get something in your eye. No, no, I'm not even that. If I see other people crying, my eyes just water. That's not crying. I don't know what you call that. It's empathizing, right? It's a form of empathy. I don't know. You just feel things. But again, in all seriousness, you want to be able to just think about the fact that you're going to be taking a lot on yourself in an emotional way. So you need to put that into perspective. And lastly, I think before we identify those last key two points, think about patient contact because believe it or not, for those of you out there who have been thinking, I just want to help people. I want to take care of people and make people feel better and make their lives better. Believe it or not, there are people who go through medical school and then become pathologists. Do you think, well, okay, that's different because the patients that they're taking care of are dead, right? So not all the time. You can do live tissue samples. Okay, that is true. But I think the question becomes how much patient contact do you want? Because... Do you want just a small piece of the patient or do you want the whole patient? Right. You're not going to be interacting with patients in any sort of the same way as a pathologist that you are if you're a primary care physician or a hospitalist. It's just very different. And another thing is that people often don't realize as a radiologist, unless you're doing ultrasounds all day, you're not going to have a lot of patient contact either. So that's something also to clarify for yourself once you're really involved and invested in medical school. Think about the level, the amount of patient contact that you want. Yeah. All right. So those are three major things to think about as you start to figure out what you're what you're going to be when you grow up. There are two other small points that we want to make, but we think are important. And the first one, and we had a whole podcast about this back in episode 52, I believe, with Alexa talking about mentors. And one of the biggest things that I think is key to success in life, success in medical school is having a mentor, having somebody that will help guide you along the way. Because having somebody hold your hand, not necessarily hold your hand, but having somebody that will show you the path and help you maybe open some doors and give you the confidence that you need is going to be key to, I think, everything in life. I completely agree. They can broaden your experience, expose you to all the different facets of that field. They can provide you with opportunities to meet people in that field, people who are doing a lot of key research or people who are clinical masters in that field. People who you shadow with, other physicians who can become your mentors, they can become your letter writers. There are key things along the way through medical school. And then also just in defining the rest of your career, having a mentor, a role model, someone to look up to, someone to help pave the way for you and show you where to go and what to avoid. It's just, it's life-changing and it's key. Yeah. So find your mentor. Find a mentor early. If it's a research mentor, find a clinical mentor. The minute you think that you're interested and if you're interested in like six different things, don't go out and necessarily find six different mentors. But if you become really passionate about a field, find someone who is also passionate. You don't have to go to the chair of the department. Maybe someone is an old codger who really does it. The chair might not have time for you. Yeah, they might not have time. They might not be interested. They may have way too many other priorities. Find someone who you connect with, who you look up to, who you say, "God, when I'm a doctor, I want to be like that person." Yeah. It could be a new resident. It could be a new attending. Absolutely. Somebody that understands what you're going through. It could be anybody. The last thing is one of the biggest questions pre-med students love to ask and medical students love to ask because everybody thinks that on an application you have to have research. Research to research research. We talked about a little bit when we were mentioning the getting early exposure because you might need research for the more competitive residencies. But if you're interested in a field like neurosurgery, ENT, ophthalmology, maybe radiation oncology, do we keep mentioning radiation oncology because you interviewed a radiation oncologist the other day for the specialty series? It's actually another good Dr. Gray. Was his uncle of radiation oncology? I don't think so. You just mentioned that. Okay, never mind. There are some specialties that want you to do research in that specialty. Unlike medical school where some schools will like you to do research just to show that you are research oriented, if you are applying for neurosurgery and they want you to have research experience, it better be in neurosurgery. Yeah, it's very true. Some programs will even want you to have been published. It was crazy learning about meeting friends in residency who had already been published three or four times over in medical school in their field. You need to keep your eyes open. That's part of also going back to finding a mentor because you may find a mentor very early on. They may tell you you need to do research and start getting involved now. You can find a research mentor and try to get involved in a project early on. Learn about whatever program, whatever specialty you're thinking about. Try to, again, learn as much as you can early on because you'll find out if research is something that you need to get involved in. Just like you might spend that first summer between, that only summer between first and second year, gaining some more clinical experience in a field, you might instead use that opportunity to really spend lots and lots of time focused on research. Find these key times and these key people to get this all in. Those were five things to think about when you're starting to formulate in your mind what you're going to do as a specialty. Once you're done with medical school and you're applying for these residencies and what you're going to do with the rest of your life. I like saying that. What you're going to be when you grow up, it's important. It's not the end of the world if you get into a residency and you go, "Oh, crap. I don't like this." It's not the end of the world. You can switch residencies. It might not be the easiest thing, but it's possible. We know plenty of people did do it. Don't think that you only have one chance to pick the right thing. Absolutely. We talked a lot about mentoring. We talked a lot about knowing what to do and where to go. I want to take a minute and talk about the academy for a second. This is something that Allison and I started a couple months ago. We have about 50 charter members, beta members in the academy right now that we're basically their mentors, if you want to think of it that way. I want to be your mentor. The person listening right now, Allison and I want to be your mentors. The academy is there to help guide you on your path as you come up with questions. You go to a friendly, non-anonymous form. Everybody's using their real names. A lot of people, the majority people, have their picture on there. You go and you ask a question and you don't have to worry about somebody coming on there and yelling at you for asking a dumb question. You can come to our question and answer live office hours where you come and we're all on video chat and you can ask us questions and we answer you and you get the answers you need and we have webinars and video courses. There are a lot of great resources. We mentioned a couple of times we've been doing a ton of specialty series interviews and Allison does those interviews. It's interesting. We talked earlier about being open-minded when you're going through your rotation so that you can learn what each specialty does. As Allison is going through these interviews and I'm listening to them, we're learning a ton of stuff still about each interview and each specialty. We absolutely are. I think we started that because we wanted you all as either pre-meds or medical students early on to have a real window into what is it like to be a so-and-so? What is it like to be a dermatologist? What is it like to be a radiologist? Because I think a lot of people, again, have that spark of interest very early on, but they don't really know what it means. It's hard to sit down and read about it in a book or start volunteering in a hospital and maybe getting just a little glimpse of it. It's a real way with these specialty interviews to hear directly from a practicing physician in that specialty, what do I do on a daily basis? What kinds of diseases do I treat? How did I get into this field? What are the things you need to know? How competitive is this field? Each interview is probably about 20, 30 minutes long and it's really in-depth about that field. I think it's really a valuable tool. By the time we're done, we'll have about 30 or 40 of these in every field. More than that, because we'll have multiple for each. We want to get, not just one person giving their experience. We want to hear multiple people. We want to hear the internal medicine doc that's been practicing for 40 years and get a good story of how medicines change throughout the years. The Academy has been awesome. We've learned a ton from the members and hopefully the members have learned a ton from us. We're mentioning this now because we're going to reopen it probably in the next week or two. If you're not on the list to be notified when it reopens, go get on the list now. Join theacademy.net is where you can sign up to get notified. It is a membership site. There is a fee. It's the cost of two lunches a month, if that. Yeah, a few Starbucks drinks and you're golden. $15 a month. I think that's nothing. We were comparing this and looking around and seeing that there are private pre-med advisors that are charging $3,000, $4,000 for private pre-med advising sessions. We said this is ridiculous. The technology is available to offer this to more people, and so let's use the technology. We're using the internet. We're using video recording. We're using Skype-type video conferencing to get everybody together throughout the country and collaborate together to make everybody a better applicant, a better physician in the end. Yeah, and as part of being in the academy, you will have access to several, lots of different physicians, so not just Ryan and myself, but other what we call experts who are out there who want to see you succeed and want to see you do well, and that rich community that you'll have, we think there are a lot of really valuable resources that are going to be available to you in the academy, and it's at an affordable price, so we think you should definitely join us. Yeah, so I want to play a quick testimonial from one of our members, Julio, who we asked him for a testimonial. We didn't tell him what to say. We didn't give him anything for this testimonial, but I want to play this testimonial because I think it'll help you understand what we're all about. Hi, my name is Julio, and I just want to briefly mention why I joined the academy. As a pre-med, sometimes it can be a little overwhelming, and sometimes confusing to sit through all that information that is available on the internet regarding how to apply to medical school, what classes I need to take, how do I need to score on an MCAT, what do I need to say in an interview? What I've found is that not only does the academy allow me to be a part of a wide diverse community of other people, it's a lot more than just an online forum. It gives me access to a wealth of information like medical school dean interviews, interviews with medical specialists, webinars on how to apply, office hours with Ryan and Allison, even mock interviews with critiques on how to answer questions. I've yet to find anything of this quality on the internet, the completeness that the academy offers is like having your own pre-med advisor, or even being a part of a pre-med online group or online club. Joining the academy will only put you ahead of the curve when it comes to testing for the MCAT and comes to applying and interviewing for schools. Everybody on here, whether pre-med, med student or doctor, is here to offer you the most unbiased, straight and to-the-point information available. You will not be getting any deceptive or belittling advice or criticisms on here. There are no gunner attitudes or personalities to deal with. This is a community where we are passionate with wanting to see each other succeed. What I would say to any other pre-med thinking about joining the academy is, well, you really don't have anything to lose. If you are serious about making yourself the most competent, complete and informed pre-med applicant out there, then this is an investment with immeasurable returns. Give us a try and see for yourself. I'm confident that you will not be disappointed. All right, so that was Julio. I think it was a great somebody else saying what the academy is about instead of us. So hopefully you give us a look. Like I said, go to jointheacademy.net. Sign up to be notified when we reopen. So I think that wraps up today's podcast. Let's continue the conversation. If you have other thoughts on how to choose a specialty, if you've had some experiences that you think have helped you narrow down what you want to do, continue the conversation with us. MedicalschoolHQ.net/55 will take you to the show notes page where you can leave a comment and tell us what you think and we'll continue the conversation there. You can also on the show notes page, we will have some resources and some links that we mentioned like the research article that I mentioned and some algorithms that we talked about and there's a medical school or a medical specialty test. I think it's University of Virginia maybe. Medical specialty aptitude test. It's not I wouldn't put so much stock in it because I took it today just for fun. I'll put a picture of the results for Allison in the show notes. I took a picture of that. It's like a personality test like the Myers-Briggs. If any of you have ever taken that in college or some other time and you answer 130 questions and they're things like do you tend to be someone who accepts long-term outcomes? Are you a doer or a thinker? Right and so again it's not I wouldn't take it as gold because even as a very happy neurologist now I think like neurology was like number six on the list and nephrology and rheumatology were one and two anyway so it's but it's just another tool out there just like some of these books and other links will be for you all to try. Yeah so go to the show notes find us on Twitter. I am at medical school HQ. Allison is at Allison with two L's underscore MS HQ. You can go to our feedback page medicalschoolhq.net/feedback where you can leave us a audio voicemail that we can play here on the podcast and answer your questions that other people might be having as well so we can help a lot of people at once. So I think that wraps it up say goodbye Allison. Bye everybody. I hope the information provided will help better guide you on your path to becoming a physician. I hope you join us next time here at the medical school headquarters. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
