Peer Resources
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The Diverse Interest Group has searched the Internet for Web sites that might help you, the medical student, decide what type of medicine you would like to practice. Below are the links to the most helpful Web sites. For more information, contact: taylor.finseth@osumc.edu.
Best Web Site to Start Your Search
AAMC’s Careers in Medicine Web site: http://www.aamc.org/careersinmedicine.
This Web site is the university-endorsed resource. It is designed just for medical students and can be accessed with a code provided by the College of Medicine (e-mail jane.trask@osumc.edu for the access code). Once registered, students can take self-assessments to help them understand themselves, research specialties, and get decision-making advice. Many of the self-assessments require the student to know about their clinical preferences (i.e., how much time they would like to spend in outpatient care), and therefore the self-assessments may not be useful until the student gets more clinical experience in the third and fourth year.
Specialty Exploration
http://www.smbs.buffalo.edu/RESIDENT/CareerCounseling/main_menu.htm
This is a very good Web site for exploring specialties and finding the positives and negatives of the job. It features a profile for each specialty made from compiling survey responses from real physicians in each field. The surveys look at important things like job satisfaction, hours, salary, family life/lifestyle, creativity, certainty of outcomes, and just about any other category that might be of interest to you. The site also has a self-assessment tool to help students decide what specialties fit them best. The site claims that it works best for students if they follow their resources step by step.
https://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/medschool/portal/cim/welcome.php
This site provides brief summaries of many specialties and a timetable that advises students on what they should be doing in their career search throughout the four years of medical school. There are some external links and other resources provided by the site itself in an effort to help students select specialties and make relevant decisions.
http://studentdoctor.net/blog/category/medical-md-do/physician-profiles
This Web site conducts interviews with doctors in different specialties. It is a nice resource to get a more personal look at what a specialty is like. Doctors from lesser known specialties are often interviewed. They update once in a while with new interviews.
Residency Exploration
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/2997.html
This Web site provides stats on the residency years of each specialty. It also helps to locate residency programs and provide information about each. One problem is that many specialties have missing/incomplete data. This would be helpful for third- and fourth-year students in their residency searches and decisions.
This is a general search site to help students find residencies, fellowships, and employers. Third- and fourth-year students will find it useful in making a residency choice.
This is a residency guide that allows students to learn about specialties and their residency training requirements. It provides match data and talks about the residency application. Numerous links are also provided to other Web sites. This is not as well planned as other sites, but it can still be helpful to people.
Self-Assessment
http://www.med-ed.virginia.edu/specialties
This Web site allows students to take an aptitude test in order to be matched to a few specialties and narrow down their search. The College of Medicine endorses the Careers in Medicine aptitude test because it has been studied and shown to be effective.