Hi guys,
I am currently a MS3 at a mid-low tier med school in Midwest with very limited and low tier home residency program (less than 1% match into our home program each year) We are currently half way through our rotation and I have done family, surgery, ortho elective, and finishing up Psych.
I personally had a lot of inner conflicts about what I am interested in doing. I grew up in a surgeon household in a different country (China) and was living under the influence of surgeon's life for 18 years before I came to US for college on my own. My father is a general surgeon but also manages GI patients at his hospitals (IBD, ICU, Infection disease).
Growing up in such household does gave a me a limited perspective on medicine as everything is surrounded by surgery. Although one of my uncle is a cardiologist and one my aunt is in EM, my Dad always had this "self feeling" that surgery is the best. Despite all these, I have always been keeping an open mind before and during medical school. I am still currently on a F1 student visa and often joke with my friend if the government want me to be in rural Montana to practice I will go. However, since the surgery rotation, I really had a lot of self doubt about what I want to do in the future. I want my future career to be a balance of critical thinking and procedure, with teaching and research sprinkled on top.
For surgery rotation
I like helping out with procedure, but just doing retractions and standing around is boring as hell. Especially those robotics one we are literally not doing anything...... I feel like the biggest punishment for surgery rotation is the limited opportunity to do anything
Although I was able to manage and enjoy a 6 week rotation during COVID, I know deep down if this was the original 8 weeks rotation+ weekend calls I would probably crash towards the end.
Although it was fun seeing different pathologies each day, waking up at 4am everyday is dreadful. I had to pull myself up every morning. No one should wake up that early unless you are selling breakfast.
We had a wonderful group of ortho residents but the general surgery residents are miserable to work with. You could tell the ortho people are genially happy and the general surgery people hate to work there. The attendings are also not that happy in general surgery. One attending had to be on call for a full month (he had notes as late as 2 am or 3am). It seems like the hours did not got better after residency. A good number of attendings yell at med students and residents for no good reasons. This is in a community-academic trauma center hospital.
I have heard of all the sayings such as if you can imagine anything outside surgery don't do surgery etc. After the rotation I could definitely tell why this is the case. For my overall impression, I think I am more of a detailed orientated person and enjoys the smaller parts of life. During ortho I like the spine cases but did not really enjoy their bread and butter cases of joint replacements, it was too messy and violent to participate. I am also surprised by how a limited scope of general surgery has become in the US. It seems like everything here have their boundaries and you can only practice a limited number of pathologies. I also don't like how little critical thinking diagnosis is playing in general surgery as our goal is just get them to the OR. Often times GI and IR have to come in to cancel our procedures due to various problems. Everything is just so specialized now, both in surgery and IM.
About my stats, I am an international student in a US medical school, Step1 260+, preclinical honors, decent number of volunteer and leadership activities, decent number of papers (10+) but scattered in many different fields (general surgery, wound, burn, GI, ortho) since I don't have a particular interest. Most of the conferences and research are done prior to med school (i did a master program and worked for 2 years). Had 3 conference presentation in med school life so far.
I think the biggest question I have in my mind is about the IM life. Unfortunately due to COVID my IM rotation won't happen till March and I kind of need to understand what to expect with IM? I am particularly interested in Cardio, GI and Pulm. What are my chances for these given their competitiveness? I want to know if it is possible to endure the 3 years of IM before getting into these fellowships? Also what about life in IM compared to surgery? Thanks a ton!
With regard to the surgical specialties (urology, ENT, Opth) we kind of limited options due to lack of connections and home programs. I tried reaching out to opth research but has been painfully slow and I am not confident if I can produce a valuable research project before submitting applications. Also I need a visa for residency and opth definitely has much less spots and programs than IM and general surgery
I am currently a MS3 at a mid-low tier med school in Midwest with very limited and low tier home residency program (less than 1% match into our home program each year) We are currently half way through our rotation and I have done family, surgery, ortho elective, and finishing up Psych.
I personally had a lot of inner conflicts about what I am interested in doing. I grew up in a surgeon household in a different country (China) and was living under the influence of surgeon's life for 18 years before I came to US for college on my own. My father is a general surgeon but also manages GI patients at his hospitals (IBD, ICU, Infection disease).
Growing up in such household does gave a me a limited perspective on medicine as everything is surrounded by surgery. Although one of my uncle is a cardiologist and one my aunt is in EM, my Dad always had this "self feeling" that surgery is the best. Despite all these, I have always been keeping an open mind before and during medical school. I am still currently on a F1 student visa and often joke with my friend if the government want me to be in rural Montana to practice I will go. However, since the surgery rotation, I really had a lot of self doubt about what I want to do in the future. I want my future career to be a balance of critical thinking and procedure, with teaching and research sprinkled on top.
For surgery rotation
I like helping out with procedure, but just doing retractions and standing around is boring as hell. Especially those robotics one we are literally not doing anything...... I feel like the biggest punishment for surgery rotation is the limited opportunity to do anything
Although I was able to manage and enjoy a 6 week rotation during COVID, I know deep down if this was the original 8 weeks rotation+ weekend calls I would probably crash towards the end.
Although it was fun seeing different pathologies each day, waking up at 4am everyday is dreadful. I had to pull myself up every morning. No one should wake up that early unless you are selling breakfast.
We had a wonderful group of ortho residents but the general surgery residents are miserable to work with. You could tell the ortho people are genially happy and the general surgery people hate to work there. The attendings are also not that happy in general surgery. One attending had to be on call for a full month (he had notes as late as 2 am or 3am). It seems like the hours did not got better after residency. A good number of attendings yell at med students and residents for no good reasons. This is in a community-academic trauma center hospital.
I have heard of all the sayings such as if you can imagine anything outside surgery don't do surgery etc. After the rotation I could definitely tell why this is the case. For my overall impression, I think I am more of a detailed orientated person and enjoys the smaller parts of life. During ortho I like the spine cases but did not really enjoy their bread and butter cases of joint replacements, it was too messy and violent to participate. I am also surprised by how a limited scope of general surgery has become in the US. It seems like everything here have their boundaries and you can only practice a limited number of pathologies. I also don't like how little critical thinking diagnosis is playing in general surgery as our goal is just get them to the OR. Often times GI and IR have to come in to cancel our procedures due to various problems. Everything is just so specialized now, both in surgery and IM.
About my stats, I am an international student in a US medical school, Step1 260+, preclinical honors, decent number of volunteer and leadership activities, decent number of papers (10+) but scattered in many different fields (general surgery, wound, burn, GI, ortho) since I don't have a particular interest. Most of the conferences and research are done prior to med school (i did a master program and worked for 2 years). Had 3 conference presentation in med school life so far.
I think the biggest question I have in my mind is about the IM life. Unfortunately due to COVID my IM rotation won't happen till March and I kind of need to understand what to expect with IM? I am particularly interested in Cardio, GI and Pulm. What are my chances for these given their competitiveness? I want to know if it is possible to endure the 3 years of IM before getting into these fellowships? Also what about life in IM compared to surgery? Thanks a ton!
With regard to the surgical specialties (urology, ENT, Opth) we kind of limited options due to lack of connections and home programs. I tried reaching out to opth research but has been painfully slow and I am not confident if I can produce a valuable research project before submitting applications. Also I need a visa for residency and opth definitely has much less spots and programs than IM and general surgery