Career choices

Tuesday was career night. Yes, yes I know this is a few days after the fact. But I didn’t have time to post. Blood and onc is slowly and painfully destroying me. One more week to go. Pray that I’ll survive till then.

Anywayz, back to what I was saying. Tuesday was career night at the hospital. It was a talk with the post-graduate director about the whole CARMs-residency matching process. Then some fourth year students and 1st year residents came in to talk about their experiences as well as electives that they did. Lotsa info, lotsa stuff I didn’t know. Sort of freaked me out. For example, apparently in order to become a doctor, it’s not as simple as graduating from med school. Firstly, you must get into a residency training program. Then before you go, you need to write not one but two licensing exams. Then you need to finish residency, write another set of exams to get I guess your ‘real’ license. Then you need to apply for malpractice insurance and go into ‘independent’ practice. Pfeww. Who knew it was so complicated. Who ever said getting in was the hardest part must not have gone to this talk.

After this we were let loose to visit various booths with all the different programs that had first year residency programs – internal med, opthamology, emergency med, general surgery, and many more… Cramberry, another friend of ours and I walked around together and visited some of the booths we were interested in. Well what they were interested in, because I was just the tag-along, who didn’t really have any questions, and just nodded my head using my “serious” face (i.e. slight furrowing of brow while nodding fervently up & down) to make people think I know what they’re talking about when in fact I have no clue, and am probably thinking about dinner.

It was interesting to see the different characters in the different specialities:

- Pathology was very nice but nobody was visiting their booth. I felt sorry for them, so I took one of their pamphlets.

- Neurosurgery guy was slickly dressed but seemed really cocky. Every time I saw him, he was on his cell.

- Nuclear medicine was a very odd collection of characters. One guy was HUGE! Like 6 feet cubed, literally. Another one looked extremely eccentric. He had these round spectacles, and white hair that came halfway down his back. Modern day Dumbledore?? The last guy was the most “normal” looking but even then he had a major unibrow. I couldn’t look him in the eye, for fear of laughing.

- Emergency medicine guys were good-looking and young but seemed like pranksters. At the end of the night, when general surgery had left, I saw them taping stuff on the gen surg poster and then taking a pic with it. Suspicious…

- Cardiothoracic surgery guy was hot. Like super hot. I didn’t talk to him. I just ogled at his hotness.

- Internal med girl was most normal. But she seemed tired. Very tired.

There were a lot more booths, but we couldn’t visit them all. All in all a good night. Overwhelming but informative. And for me at least, very entertaining. Alas, I regret not talking to cardio guy. (fans herself over his hotness)