Top Opportunities for Medical Students

You work extremely hard in high school to make sure you get into a good college. Then you work extremely hard in college to get the grades and recommendations necessary to get into med school. Then, after you get into med school, you find you really didn’t know what hard work was. Now you’re thinking about residencies and trying to decide what you really want to do when you finally grow up. Some of the top opportunities for medical students do not involve clinical practice.

Opportunities for medical students depend to a great extent on where you started. Your background, culture, whether you’re from a rural, urban or small town environment, all have significant influence on your goals. People with rural or small town ties are more likely to want to go back to that type of environment to practice and often pick primary care, especially Family Practice. Individuals who came from the inner city may want to dedicate their lives to helping the people they grew up with. But whatever dreams you have, there are a myriad of choices.

Residencies: The usual route.

• Primary care – Family Practice, Internal Medicine, Ob-Gyn, Pediatrics, Med-Peds.
• General surgery – The starting point for most surgical specialties and subspecialities. If you just want to do surgery in a rural area with a small hospital, you will be ready to start your practice.
• Orthopedic surgery, emergency medicine, other normal residencies
• Transitional year – Basically this is a year of internship, a year of medical and surgical rotations to give the future dermatologist, radiologist, neurologist, ophthalmologist or anesthesiologist experience beyond the narrow confines of his field.

But there are other paths to follow, some rather off the beaten track.

• MD/JD joint degrees – After completing med school, it would seem difficult to keep on going to school, but the opportunities and the financial benefits for someone with both a medical and a law degree are tremendous. There are many areas of law in which the dual degrees will make you an expert, most obviously healthcare. But management of medical organizations and academic careers in both medicine and law are possibilities as well.
• Other combined MD degrees – Adding a PhD, MBA (Master of Business Administration), MPH (Master of Public Health) or an MPA ( Master of Public Administration) opens up a multitude of career paths outside of the usual medical practice.
• Administration – With or without a residency a medical degree can open doors to a job as an administrator, especially in hospitals or healthcare organizations. A second degree such as a MPA or MBA can be obtained later to advance your career.
• Pharmaceutical company executive – The drug companies are looking for MDs with administrative skills.
• Medical consultant – An expert is needed by architects, healthcare planners, authors, film producers and multiple government agencies to sort out the language and concepts.
• Public service – Otherwise known as a political career, this is a definite possibility for those with public speaking abilities and strong political beliefs.

There are a huge number of training programs available to improve your leadership skills, improve your writing and business talents, turn you into an orator and start you on a course that may take you a long way towards your dreams.

And if you decide you really do want to practice medicine in one of its many forms, there are companies that specialize in helping doctors get established wherever they want to live. New England, the Southwest, the Gulf Coast – pick your own version of paradise.

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