Earlier this week at the the GLIC session between 3rd year clerkship blocks, I gave a session about Choosing a Specialty. In that session, I covered some topics that you may have read about here in this blog before. Hopefully, many of you already know about the Careers in Medicine web portal from the AAMC. It is a great resource which has a lot of great information about anything and everything related to choosing a specialty and landing a residency. A portion of my presentation covered some of the essentials of the Careers in Medicine site and some high yield places that you can explore to help you choose a specialty. There were also some fun graphics and videos poking fun at various specialties.
These are just jokes! I love all other types of doctors!
You can view a recording of the session here and get a tutorial on how to check out and explore the Careers in Medicine web portal. While I would love for you to watch the entire session, if you just watch the Careers in Medicine web portal tutorial, that would be nice. I am going to list a few of the highlights below.
When you first log in to the site, you will see 3 tabs across the top: Choose Your Specialty, Land Your Residency and Shape Your Career. (Because of my role, I also have an Advisors and Liaisons tab that you will not have)
When you hover over the Choose Your Specialty tab, you will see a drop down menu with: Medical Specialties, Find Your Fit, Skills and Experiences and Making the Decision. The place that I think you will spend a good amount of time is going to be in that Medical Specialties menu. If you click on that you will get to a listing of all of the specialties available:
You can click on them and see a great deal of information about each specialty, including common diagnoses, salary ranges, training tracks available, competitiveness level, what the workplace is really like and other places you can seek out information:
The other important area under Choose Your Specialty is Find Your Fit:
You will find that there are tools and articles and other thoughts to help you consider your Interests, Lifestyle and Other Influences. Starting with the Class of 2019, we are going to be requiring student’s to each take the Medical Specialty Preference Inventory in November and the Physician Values in Practice Scale in February and go over the results. Ideally, in each case you will make a plan with your Lead Advisor on what the next steps in the process of deciding on a specialty will be.
There are also CV and Personal Statement resources, interview etiquette and tips, tools to help compare specialties and even ways to search for individual residency programs. Feel free to go out to the site and explore!