HS Senior

[JCain18]

Hi, I'm just a lowly high school senior wondering about my future. Thank you in advance for NOT telling me to stay on the high school thread and NOT saying not to worry about this kind of stuff yet.

I love high-stress situations where decisions have to be made on the fly, so emergency medicine seems like the only option for me. I would pursue trauma surgery, but I can't deal with the 75+ hour weeks and extra-long residency PLUS that fellowship. Soooo what are the best and worst parts of being an emergency physician? Hours, pay, average time with patients, environment, etc.

I also heard that trauma surgeons run the trauma bay and get all the cool cases. What type of patients would an ER doc see the most? In other words, are ER docs just getting the uninsured with minor and boring problems?

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[Makati2008]

Hi, I'm just a lowly high school senior wondering about my future. Thank you in advance for NOT telling me to stay on the high school thread and NOT saying not to worry about this kind of stuff yet.

I love high-stress situations where decisions have to be made on the fly, so emergency medicine seems like the only option for me. I would pursue trauma surgery, but I can't deal with the 75+ hour weeks and extra-long residency PLUS that fellowship. Soooo what are the best and worst parts of being an emergency physician? Hours, pay, average time with patients, environment, etc.

I also heard that trauma surgeons run the trauma bay and get all the cool cases. What type of patients would an ER doc see the most? In other words, are ER docs just getting the uninsured with minor and boring problems?

If your complaining about work hours already, you probably wouldn't make a good EM resident because you'll be working those long hours on icu and trauma....

 

[HoosierdaddyO]

Come back in two years when you pass organic chemistry lol. I know that wasn't helpful, but start college first and the pre med courses before you plan your career

 

[DarkHorse22]

Look up local hospitals, see if any have volunteer programs or scribe programs. Either that or get in touch with ED docs and see if you can shadow. Seeing what we do/how we do it/the patients we see is best experienced through your own eyes. Nothing written on the internet will be as valuable as first hand experience.

Otherwise...I'll echo what others have said. Work and study hard, have fun, enjoy college and get into med school first.

 

[Perrin]

Hi, I'm just a lowly high school senior wondering about my future. Thank you in advance for NOT telling me to stay on the high school thread and NOT saying not to worry about this kind of stuff yet.

I love high-stress situations where decisions have to be made on the fly, so emergency medicine seems like the only option for me. I would pursue trauma surgery, but I can't deal with the 75+ hour weeks and extra-long residency PLUS that fellowship. Soooo what are the best and worst parts of being an emergency physician? Hours, pay, average time with patients, environment, etc.

I also heard that trauma surgeons run the trauma bay and get all the cool cases. What type of patients would an ER doc see the most? In other words, are ER docs just getting the uninsured with minor and boring problems?

The best way to determine what specialty fits you, is to flip through your senior yearbook.

Lettered in 2 or more sports - ortho
Played, but didn't letter - gen surg
President of the AV club - rads
Team captain of quiz bowl - IM
Cheerleader or pep squad - derm
What's a yearbook? - path
Homeless Outreach club - psych
Most pics of you are with a teacher - any specialty that gets you into hospital administration
'No photo available' - EM
Glee club - Peds

All kidding aside, at 17/18 y.o., you have no idea what will be tolerable hour-wise to you almost 10 years from now. If a specialty is interesting and exciting to you, the number of hours will not always seem so rough. As a HS student, I doubt you've devoted 75 hours in a week to any single endeavor.

You should focus on short term goals such as experiencing life, developing personal interests outside of school, making good grades in college, etc. Hell, I studied architecture for 4 years before deciding on medicine. Of the officers in my med school's EM interest group, I'm the only one practicing EM. One went into ortho and the other quit school and became a pastor.

Be young, have fun, and don't let worry about the future overwhelm the present. You'll be able to spend the rest of your life doing that when you finish.

 

[winkleweizen]

The majority of trauma surgeons cases are boring just like ours.

 

[theseeker4]

Hi, I'm just a lowly high school senior wondering about my future. Thank you in advance for NOT telling me to stay on the high school thread and NOT saying not to worry about this kind of stuff yet.

I love high-stress situations where decisions have to be made on the fly, so emergency medicine seems like the only option for me. I would pursue trauma surgery, but I can't deal with the 75+ hour weeks and extra-long residency PLUS that fellowship. Soooo what are the best and worst parts of being an emergency physician? Hours, pay, average time with patients, environment, etc.

I also heard that trauma surgeons run the trauma bay and get all the cool cases. What type of patients would an ER doc see the most? In other words, are ER docs just getting the uninsured with minor and boring problems?

I second the advice to shadow. As a senior medical student currently applying to EM residencies, I will also repeat the advice that the best thing you can do right now is shadow doctors, and volunteer in hospital and other clinical settings. If you hate actually working with patients, you would want to know that now, not when third year of medical school starts. If you find medicine itself is not something you enjoy, it is a lot easier to change your mind early on in college than after you have started medical school.

I say this as someone who went through 4 years of undergraduate education pursuing law. I graduated with a history degree and an LSAT score that would get me into law school only to decide not to apply. My biggest problem was I was, immaturely, enamored with the pop culture idea of being a lawyer without any real exposure to the actual job. If I had pursued job shadowing and talking with practicing attorneys, I very well might not have taken the detour that has me graduating from medical school at the age of 33 instead of 26. I can't say the time was wasted because I gained a lot of experience, including working in various full time jobs, and gained a wife and family along the way, but that is still over half a decade less that I have to practice medicine.

The point is, learn about what you currently are thinking about pursuing, and you will be in a much better position to make educated decisions that are right for you, the first time, instead of having to redirect later in life.

And this isn't a comment to "GTFO of here," but you will find many more good ideas as to how you can gain clinical exposure, and position yourself for admission to medical school, in the pre-allopathic forum than you will in this forum. Good luck!

 

[theseeker4]

I forgot to include in my post above, you will have a lot of boring stuff in any specialty you pursue. EM has sore throats, "boring" lacerations to repair, diffuse abdominal pain, ear aches, individuals who are brought in literally every single day to sleep off their drunk, etc. Surgeons have routine cases, rounding, changing wound vacs on the same patient week after week, managing a patient long term, which to me is definitely not worth the excitement of the initial case. Sure, you might do a long, complicated repair of multiple gunshot wounds to the abdomen, but who will be rounding on that patient for the next two months of recovery, checking daily labs, adjusting fluid rates, fighting with the patient over what is adequate pain management that won't delay the patient's recovery, etc? It is the same surgeon who was in charge of the exciting OR case.

And if you fear there won't be enough excitement in the ER, or you won't get to do enough, that depends on where you practice. Sure, some places you will always take the back seat to the trauma team for any traumas, but in others, you either won't have an in-house trauma surgeon and will have to manage the patient until surgery shows up, or you will be the primary doctor in charge until the patient is moved out of the ER. Just a couple weeks ago, rotating in the ED in an urban hospital, there was a resuscitative thoracotomy in a GSW patient, with the trauma surgeon serving as support while the EM residents performed the procedure.

Shadow and talk to EM physicians, both those who advise you to NOT pursue medicine (not hard to find) and those who enjoy their jobs. And branch out, don't restrict yourself to EM because that is what you think you want to do now, talk to doctors, and shadow, in as many specialties as you can. There are likely specialties you haven't even heard of, that might be extremely interesting and enjoyable to you.

 

[SasquatchPM&R]

Get a job as a scribe. No better way to experience the field at your age.

 

[alpinism]

Hi, I'm just a lowly high school senior wondering about my future. Thank you in advance for NOT telling me to stay on the high school thread and NOT saying not to worry about this kind of stuff yet.

I love high-stress situations where decisions have to be made on the fly, so emergency medicine seems like the only option for me. I would pursue trauma surgery, but I can't deal with the 75+ hour weeks and extra-long residency PLUS that fellowship. Soooo what are the best and worst parts of being an emergency physician? Hours, pay, average time with patients, environment, etc.

I also heard that trauma surgeons run the trauma bay and get all the cool cases. What type of patients would an ER doc see the most? In other words, are ER docs just getting the uninsured with minor and boring problems?

Depends on the hospital.

At some county and community shops ER docs run all trauma resuscitations then consult surgery only if needed.

The most?

Lots of abdominal pain, chest pain, shortness of breath, headache, dizziness, syncope, weakness, and altered mental status.

 

[EskimoFriend13]

Just want to second what others have said about working as a scribe. I really wish I had known about this as a pre-med. Especially for those of us without any health-care workers in our family, it's an awesome way to get a ton of exposure. It's much more useful than hospital volunteering where you are usually limited in how much you get to see (though some kind of community service is very important), and you get paid!

 

[iish]

The best way to determine what specialty fits you, is to flip through your senior yearbook.

Lettered in 2 or more sports - ortho
Played, but didn't letter - gen surg
President of the AV club - rads
Team captain of quiz bowl - IM
Cheerleader or pep squad - derm
What's a yearbook? - path
Homeless Outreach club - psych
Most pics of you are with a teacher - any specialty that gets you into hospital administration
'No photo available' - EM
Glee club - Peds

That is a shockingly accurate characterization. The best one is EM. Definitely the goofball that had more fun than anyone else but still managed to squeeze through the establishment while despising the establishment

 

[EskimoFriend13]

"Mean girls"- ob?

 

[DeadCactus]

Thank you in advance for NOT telling me to stay on the high school thread and NOT saying not to worry about this kind of stuff yet.

No.

 

[Old_Mil]

Congratulations on putting some thought into your future. That is something that most high school students don't do, and probably something I should have done more of when I was your age.

The thing is, at this point in your life the future is so far away that it is hard to predict what the world will look like when you get there.

So preparing for the future is best done in generalities like "learn a second language", "become a kick ass golfer/guitar player", "letter in a sport", rather than "I want to become an EM doc."

Given current trends, our medical system will be more like Zimbabwe than what you have grown up knowing by the time you are ready to enter practice. That soon to be 20 trillion in debt is going to come out of the pocket of someone and it isn't going to be mine.

I am going to recommend that you read an old book by a gentleman named Harry Browne: "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World."

The specifics of some of his writings are no longer valid because the world today is less free than the one he lived in, but many of his ideas are still valuable.

Good luck in whatever you decide to do.