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Important Details About (Almost) Every Medical Specialty

At the time of this writing, there are 26 medical and surgical specialities to choose from when applying for residency in the Match. These include: Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Internal Medicine/Pediatrics, Family Medicine, Emergency Medicine, Neurology, Child Neurology, Psychiatry, Dermatology, Radiology, Radiation Oncology, Nuclear Medicine, Medical Genetics, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Pathology, General Surgery, Thoracic Surgery, Orthopedic Surgery, Otolaryngology (ENT), Ophthalmology, Plastic Surgery, Neurosurgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Urology, Anesthesiology, and Preventative Medicine.   Many of these fields contain subspecialties which can be pursued during fellowship training after residency. This means that there truly is something for everyone!
Step Up Your MCAT Prep with The Princeton Review

Step Up Your MCAT Prep with The Princeton Review

The Premed Years had the opportunity to talk to Chris Manuel from The Princeton Review. He talks about the key things to know about the MCAT - how to prepare for the MCAT, do's and don'ts and more. Take a listen to hear from somebody who scored in the 99.9% (he thinks he missed 6 questions overall).

 

Even if you are going to take Kaplan or any other MCAT Prep course, listen to this podcast. We do go over some of the ways The Princeton Review can help you, and some of the advantages it may have over other test prep companies, but Chris also explains a lot about what and how he teaches MCAT Prep to his students and other teachers.

 

Chris also gives some great tips for all pre med students, including what to major in to get the best GPA, the type of volunteering to do, and even jobs to get in the hospital. To top it off, he also talks about what to write about in your personal statement.

All About FlexMed: Interview with Mount Sinai

What an opportunity we had for this session of The Premed Years! Dr. Muller, Dean for Medical Education at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (MSSM) took some time to go in-depth with us about FlexMed.

 

FlexMed is the newest iteration on what MSSM has had since 1987, HuMed. HuMed has allowed college sophomores and juniors to apply to MSSM and if accepted, skip the majority of the "normal" premed requirements. This includes not taking the MCAT! This has allowed the students to follow their passions in other areas, whether it be language, writing or something else.

 

Dr. Muller shares with us how FlexMed is taking everything they have learned from HuMed, and improving upon it moving forward. HuMed historically has been a 1/4 of the incoming class. FlexMed looks to have that increase to 1/2 of the class in the coming years.

 

In 2010 Dr. Muller and others published an article (link below) in the journal of Academic Medicine showing that, for the most part, HuMed students do just as well as "normal" premed students.

 

For interested students, listen to find out who the ideal applicant is for the FlexMed program.

Interview with ATSU KCOM Admissions Office

Interview with ATSU KCOM Admissions Office

For session 15, The Premed Years welcomes David Koenecke, the Assistant Vice President of Admissions at A.T. Still University's Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine (KCOM).

 

David shares some of the history of KCOM with us. If you don't know, KCOM was THE FIRST osteopathic medical school in the world. It was formerly known as American School of Osteopathy.

Interview with TheBiopsy.com Publisher Roheet

In Session 14 of The Premed Years, Roheet from TheBiopsy.com was kind enough to sit down with us and share his journey through the pre med process. Listen to find out how a newspaper changed his career path.

 

Roheet graduated from UCSD with a biomedical engineering degree and is currently in his gap year. He is in the middle of interview season, hoping to land one of the 20,000 or so seats to next years starting allopathic medical school class.

 

He is in a gap year because he had to reapply, not getting in to medical school his first time applying. Something not unusual these days, and something I had to do as well. He had a great MCAT score, a 33. He also had a good GPA at 3.6. So what was the biggest reason he didn't get in the first time? Better question, what was the reason he didn't even get an interview?

Interview with Dean of UCF College of Medicine

Interview with Dean of UCF College of Medicine

In Session 13 of The Premed Years we had the pleasure of talking to Dr. German, the Dean of The University of Central Florida College of Medicine (UCF COM). UCF COM was the first, built from the ground up, allopathic medical school in the US in almost 30 years.   It gained full accreditation this past week which is excellent! Their inaugural class is graduating this year and will find out their fate in the Match in March.

Avoiding the Burn: 7 Tips for the Premed and Med Student

Guest Post As someone who spent 11 years in clinical medicine and ultimately experienced significant burnout, I did a lot of reading about compassion fatigue and physician burnout in hopes of gaining insight as to how this happened to me. I found a lot of statistics about medical burnout itself, and realized that I was (unfortunately) in very good company, as almost half of US physicians self-report as having at least one symptom of serious burnout.
Shadowing Secrets for Every Premed

Shadowing Secrets for Every Premed

Allison and I join forces again for another session of The Premed Years.   For this session we talk about shadowing. We've already done a post about shadowing physicians, but we thought it would be good to revisit the subject since it seems to be a common question among premed students.

Jargon Every Medical Student and Premed Should Know

Medical terminology hits you like a brick wall when you start medical school. Suddenly you’re expected to be able to say and spell words like “keratoconjunctivits” or “leukoencephalopathy.” While learning…

Choosing Your Specialty: 8 Things to Think About

Selecting which field in medicine you are going to pursue can be a difficult decision for some medical students. Some students already know what specialty they want to pursue even before they start orientation. Others start to get anxious as the end of 3rd year draws near, desperately trying to figure out which field suits them best. Many use the process of elimination as they move from one clinical rotation to the next, crossing off fields of medicine they don't like and making a list of those they do. Only 5 or 6 fields of medicine are represented in the required 3rd year clinical rotations, so exploring other specialties is often necessary. The following will hopefully help you in making your decision.  

Take every opportunity to explore!

All medical schools require students to pass the following required 3rd year clinical rotations: Internal medicine, pediatrics, OB/GYN, and surgery. Many also require neurology, family medicine, emergency medicine and radiology. Therefore, if you are interested in ophthalmology, ENT, or orthopedics, you may be asking, when am I going to find out if I really want to pursue this specialty? Some schools provide elective time during the 3rd year, while many do not. As such, there is the summer between the 1st and 2nd years of medical school as well as some time early in 4th year.