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• Career planning


  A process of exploration of your interest, motivation, and values (understanding of yourself) combined with a collection of information about the possible options to reach an informed decision
• Learning objectives


  • Define career planning
  • Explain the important factors to be considered in choosing your specialty
  • Identify the resources available to make an informed decision
  • Compare different specialties in terms of the amount of patient contact and professional responsibility
• It is the right of the student to help him how to be aware as early as possible of this point and its importance in his whole life
• This lecture will help you to explore different specialties (not only study them) as you go through your academic journey. Use critical thinking skills to evaluate these different specialties
• Deciding your career is one of the extremely important decisions in your life
• New specialties are evolving like audiovestibular medicine (a specialty that deals with patients with hearing and balance disorders)
• Steps of career planning

  1. Self-evaluation

  2. Exploration

  3. Decision making
• Self-evaluation


  Explore yourself (understand yourself) your motivation, the style of life you want to live, and your abilities and your limitations. And what you are aiming for. Find out what you like and don't like
• Exploration


  Explore different specialties, through reading, through your clinical attachment, making electives courses, and by asking your professor. Be careful you are now gathering information not making a decision
• Decision making


  It is usual for medical students to start their medical college with an idea of what they want to specialize in, like I was born as a general surgeon. However medical students change their minds several times before finally narrowing in on the right specialty. Changing your mind is normal as you explore more options and increase your clinical contact. With more critical thinking, and more education and clinical experiences your decision will become more sharp and focused
• Factors affecting choosing of specialty

  • Your interest and passion
  • Amount of patient contact
  • Time required by each specialty
  • What type of work environment do you prefer?
  • Availability of training
  • Years of the study
• Your interest and passion

  Go with your passion. You should never have to force yourself to love an area of medicine. With this passion, you can overcome struggles and difficulties during your training. It helps you to be persistent and committed to your choice
• Amount of patient contact

  All specialties involve some patient contact at some point. Some specialties have less patient contact than others like Radiology and Histopathology (working behind the scenes). Specialties with long patient contact are Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Rheumatology, and Oncology. All specialties are important and we should respect all the specialties. All of them have an important place and role in the process of patient care. All should serve the patient
• Time required by each specialty

  If you want to control your time, a Specialty with more on-call demand is most likely unfit with you like general surgery, gynecology, orthopedics, and anesthesiology. Specialties with less on-call demand like dermatology, Radiology, family medicine, and histopathology
• What type of work environment do you prefer?

  The rapidly paced emergency environment or the quiet environment of an office like family medicine or radiologist. Or the challenges of the surgical work
• Availability of training


  You have to consider the presence of training opportunity in your city or far from your home or maybe outside the country. Some specialty training centers are present only in the capital
• Years of the study

  Some specialties span 4-5 years to be a specialist, and some require a further three years to be a subspecialist like electro cardiologist (specialist in cardio-electric disorders)
• Resources to support your decision

  • Your clinical attachment
  • Elective courses that can help you get an depth vision of various specialties
  • Your professor and supervisors