My specialty

So, I've decided what I'm going to do with my life: I want to be an orthopedic surgeon.  It's funny to put it out there like that, especially because you spend so much time in med school trying to obfuscate your preferences.  All through 3rd year, within 5 minutes of meeting you, the residents and attendings on every rotation ask you, "So, what specialty are you thinking?" and all thru 3rd year, the correct answer is "Oh, I'm still deciding/not really sure/still ruling things out," thereby implying that their specialty is still in the runnings.

It's kind of silly, and you might say, why not just tell them what you actually want to do?  Well, unfortunately it doesn't really work that way in my experience, because as soon as they find out that you are not going into their specialty, the relationship changes.  Which is actually reasonable: if I'm on psych and they know I'm not going into psych, it would be... less fun for them to invest a lot of effort in me. I think that ultimately, mentors hope that you will want to follow in their footsteps.  If you explicitly don't plan to follow in their footsteps, you'll find that its suddenly much harder to get a mentor on a given rotation.  I know that sounds kind of cynical, but I've seen it happen, it's happened to me, and honestly, it makes sense.  And it's not the end of the world either, but in 3rd year, you find yourself fighting to learn, fighting to find good mentors.  And by telling a physician that you don't want to do what they do, you make your fight that much harder.

But enough on that, I'm putting it out there - I want to be an orthopod!

And in other news, I've been listening to SO much good music this year!  Spotify is a huge, huge part of my life - I think my priorities are 1) breathing, 2) spotify 3) food, peeing, other basic life functions. Anyway, if you are a fan of good things, this band, Periphery, is amazing - prog metal at its best!!

Aright, this feels good!  If my Netflix habit suffers a little to get this blog going again, so be it.