After finishing med school, you might not know where to put your degree to use. If you’re not that familiar yet with how the corporate side of things works beyond your textbooks and occasional internship hours, here’s a guide that can help you in seeking different possibilities with your professional medical healthcare career.
Going through the internship phase
It’s time to put the hundreds of hours of lectures and reading to good use. You shouldn’t see internships just as a requirement for progressing along your career path but look at it also as an opportunity to learn more about the business of medicine and to debunk yourself of your ideas and fantasies of what working in the medical field is like. Having a hands-on understanding of how it works won’t just keep you grounded in reality, it’ll also smack you in the head with the recurring difficulties and stress that the job requires you to manage. Being in a crowded emergency room at the dead of night isn’t the best place to be as an intern, but it’s a rite of passage that you need to deal with if you want to be a better physician.
Dealing with residency
After an internship, what you’ll be looking forward to is getting residency status. Depending on your specialty, you might take more than just a few years to fulfill your time in being a resident. Internal Medicine and pediatrics generally take three years to accomplish, Psychiatry takes as long as four years, while General Surgery takes at least five years.
Though longer years might feel like a drag, progressing through your internship and residency conditions you to become a fully-fledged doctor. The number of years allows you to gain confidence in experiencing different ailments, meeting various patients, and dealing with different hospice care business practices that you need to know like the back of your hand.
Residency and employment
With the wide variety of choices to choose from, you might not know what the best option is for you.
- Private practice is a common choice for professionals who want to try going solo or with a group of peers.
- Research-based careers are an excellent fit for those who want to delve more into the science of medicine by spending time in the lab.
- Academic medicine is commonly linked to a researched-based career, but it can also offer you a potential position in teaching hospitals that need not just physicians but teachers as well.
- Community clinics are reserved for those who want to do public service to the community who are unfortunate enough not to have insurance for treatment.
Similar to how businessmen and marketing professionals keep a well-connected network of peers, medical professionals also need to be in the loop for job offers and vacancies. Looking for physician recruiter agencies that you can join to match you and refer you to potential job opportunities is an excellent way to keep yourself on the lookout for a possible home for your skills to be put to use.
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