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Old 05-13-2009, 06:43 PM   #35
Bigredmed
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
Posts: 3,296
Your college major doesn't matter to residency programs...although based on the way you phrased your question I'm not sure you fully grasp how one enters a specialty. If you do, I apologize for the following...

Med school is not where you specialize. Med schools is where you lay the basic foundation of science knowledge, clinical skills and general understanding to enter into any field. As a fourth year student, you'll select what field you'd like to enter and apply and interview at residency programs in that specialty. You do have some freedom as a 4th year in tailoring your rotations towards things you're interested in, but those don't count towards anything other than graduation. At graduation, you're officially a doctor (you have an MD or a DO degree conferred) but you're really only ready to begin your training.

To use myself as an example. I graduated on May 1st, have a diploma with my name on it, and could sign my name as Bigredmed M.D., I have a residency position in pediatrics beginning in July...but I'm not a pediatrician. If, at this point last year, I had decided to do anesthesia, I'd still be at the same spot I am now. My classmates are going into every thing from Neurosurgery to OB/GYN to Urology to Radiology. And while we've been exposed to a lot of different aspects of medicine (my neurosurg colleagues did a clerkship in pediatrics, I caught babies on OB/GYN, every one did 6 weeks of Psychiatry, etc), it's only in residency where we'll get the intensive training, experience and skill set to be a specialist in our chosen area. And for those of us, like myself, who wish to narrow our scope of practice even further, after our residencies are done, we'll enter fellowships. I want to do pediatric critical care and take care of really sick kids in the Pediatric ICU, one of my OB/GYN friends wants to do Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility to help couples conceive, one of my Internal Medicine friends really hopes to go in Gastroenterology, a great friend who's going into radiology eventually wants to do interventional radiology, and we'll have to spend even more time in training to become those things.
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