Is becoming a Pediatrician challenging?

Bigredmed
Fri, 28 Mar 2014 13:56:25 +0000

I’m actually a board certified pediatrician.

The route to becoming a pediatrician is the same challenge as it is for any pre-medical student, as WOWMom has pointed out. If you make it through those challenges, pediatrics is generally considered an “easier” field to enter than many others. That said, competition to enter the “top” pediatrics residency programs is every bit as competitive as fields like ENT/HN Surgery, Neurosurgery or Dermatology. And this past year, in the residency match program, Pediatrics had 99.4% of all available residency spots filled - higher than any other specialty in the Match.

Being a pediatric resident is by no means easy. You spend 3 years learning how to take care of kids of all ages, from the extremely premature infants born at the edge of physiologic viability all the way to age 21 (and sometimes even older!). You’ll average 70+ hours a week and have many months where you only get 4 days off work the entire month. There are lots of times spent overnight at the hospital, missing out on what your friends and family are participating in. While you get to see lots of healthy children as they come in for regular checkups, you’ll also have to see and care for lots of very sick children as well, including some who will die on your watch. You’ll develop close relationships with families that amaze you with how much they love their kiddos, and also see children who have been injured or harmed at the hands of the people who are supposed to love them the most.

Becoming a pediatrician is certainly a rewarding path, and most surveys of physician happiness find that pediatricians are among the happiest doctors around. People go into pediatrics because they love helping kids and there are plenty of ways to do that from the general pediatrician in the community to the ICU pediatrician (like myself).

If you’d like a great example of what being a pediatric resident is like, google “Heroes of Children’s Hospital” and click on the link to Dateline NBC which followed several residents at Arkansas Children’s Hospital around for nearly a year. It’s several years old, but still quite accurate. I’d post the link but I think that violates the TOS of the forum.