<p>Maybe I can help with your question. I’m a practicing Gastroenterologist, but my best friend in Medical school went into Orthopedics. Your social life in college is really unrelated to your choice of premed as a major. Certainly you have to work hard to get the grades you need to get into Med School, but as you probably know by now, there are many different ways to get there. Some will spend their entire college life in the library, some will work hard and play hard… it’s up to you to figure it out. Med School is much the same… some students have an easy time and have plenty of time to socialize, and others really need to grind to get through. You’ll need good grades and recs in medical school to get a good residency in orthopedics. Here’s where things change dramatically… During your internship year (which for orthopedics is a required general surgery year) you will not do much else besides work. You can have a social life, but it will be dramatically different than any of your friends who are already in the working world (the exception might be a lawyer at a big city firm in his/her first year). You will work 80-100 hours/week, and although you can definitely find time to go out when you are off, most of the time you will just want to sleep. They say it’s slightly better now than when I trained, but I think that applies more to the medical specialties… in surgery you have to put in those hours or you just won’t learn the things you need to know to advance to the next level. In residency it gradually gets better, but less so in Surgery than in Internal Medicine or the other specialties. In my second year of training (officially a resident) I had some electives (like dermatology) where I wasn’t on call and lived a normal life (although this was only for a month). Those don’t really exist in surgical training. As far as my Orthopedist buddy goes… he managed to have an active social life all through his med school and residency, and finally got married after he completed his orthopedic fellowship in arthroscopy. He loves what he does and I don’t think he has any regrets.
But don’t think that you will have the free time or options that your friends that go into other fields have… you won’t. Many interns and residents become resentful during those years when they see friends that they went to college with become successful in business, have free time, and do a lot of things they can’t do, while they are still grinding away for lousy pay in their training programs. You have to be sure that’s what you want.</p>