<p>I want to help the children during my college years by tutoring or volunteering at the children museum or raising the funds for their surgeries or visiting sick children at the hospital. You get the idea. I want to do this because I love interacting with them!! But, I want to be a radiologist or something like that. Will medical schools think it’s weird that I want to help the children in college but want to be a radiologist, not a pediatrician ?</p>
<p>No…colleges love to see all types of high schoolers participate in community service. same goes for real life. just because you like to help people off the job doesn’t mean you aren’t focused.</p>
<p>Why do you want to be a radiologist? </p>
<p>The thing is that most medical students, even well into their second year are sure of what they want to do. I’ve narrowed it down only so far as I want to be a pediatric ________…from there it might be, pulmonology, critical care, surgery, cardiology, or adolescent medicine. </p>
<p>My advice is do what you want to do for involvement and co-curricular stuff during undergrad, and be open minded about specialty at this point.</p>
<p>So, you don’t HAVE to choose the specialty when you apply to medical schools? I thought we do. If not, then this thread doesn’t need to be posted. </p>
<p>I don’t know if I really want to be a radiologist (seems a great job because of good hours, analyzing, minimial patient contact, good money). I’m still opening my mind to other fields of medicine. I’m just saying that I may do some things in college and choose a specialty of other things.</p>
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<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?p=2644818[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?p=2644818</a></p>
<p>Yeah, you don’t have to choose a specialty until late in the third year (about feb/march depending on when your school does registration for electives), and even then you can push that back further all the way to your rank-order-list for the Match, if you decide to complete applications and interviews in two specialties (reccomended if you are looking towards highly competitive fields like derm).</p>
<p>Most students change their minds about specialties several times during medical school; a few change their minds during residency (most commonly, surgery to anesthesiology).</p>
<p>Third year medical school rotations elicit intense visceral and emotional responses about specialties – typically, “I hate this” or “I love this” and very little in between. Since rotations last six to eight weeks, plans about specialization change frequently during the third year. By the time fourth year rolls around, plans and preferences firm up.</p>
<p>On a practical point, stating a specialty preference in a medical school interview may be a liability since it might require defending or might inflame an interviewer’s predjudices.</p>