How to Choose Your Doctor Specialty in 6 Steps

In a future doctor's life, there are few decisions as important and nerve-wracking as choosing a specialty. Your life as a resident and attending is dramatically influenced by this singular decision. Dr. Jubbal, MedSchoolInsiders.com When most people think about specialty choice, they think about how much money they'll make and how long they'll have to train. But in this video, I'll cover the factors that actually matter when choosing the right specialty for you, including what so many medical students get wrong. You don't want to end up burned out and miserable while your classmates find a specialty that excites them to go to work every day. Stick around to learn the one factor that almost everyone misses, including the majority of med students and residents. This is how you should go about choosing a medical specialty. We know that the specialty you choose has significant immediate and long-term implications for your life. We also know that most medical students change their minds during their four years in medical school. In fact, data from a 2024 survey conducted by the AAMC on medical student specialty choice revealed that over the course of medical school, only one-third of medical students keep their preferred specialty. Of nearly 13,000 respondents, only 28% noted on the graduation questionnaire that they kept the same specialty preference as they had indicated on the matriculating student questionnaire they completed when entering medical school. 52% reported a different specialty, and the remaining 20% noted they were undecided or gave no response on their MSQ. And I can identify with these statistics. I initially started medical school wanting to go into pediatric gastroenterology because of my own chronic illness, but ultimately switched to plastic surgery after discovering that it was a better fit. I cover that journey and the process that led me to my decision over on the Kevin Jubbal, MD channel, link in the description below. So where do we go from here, and how can we create a system to decide on the best suited specialty for ourselves? Most commonly, people refer to compensation as a significant factor to help sway their decision. I don't blame them, particularly when med students graduate with an average of $260,000 in debt. While compensation is a factor, I'd argue that most physicians are quite comfortable, and compensation differences between specialties are far less important than other factors in helping you lead a happy and fulfilling life. Compensation should not be a primary or even secondary factor in making your decision. Other, more crucial factors to consider include what type of relationship and interactions you want to have with your patients, the work-life balance you desire, how much or little you enjoy performing procedures, the types of patients you generally work with, and who your colleagues will be. Does the specialty excite and captivate you? Can you imagine doing this for the rest of your life? Oftentimes, medical students fixate on rare cases or procedures that are particularly exciting in a given field. However, it's essential to understand that these zebra cases are few and far between. It's more important to determine whether or not doing the bread and butter cases, meaning the things you are more likely to see day after day, is something you can live with. But knowing how important the decision is doesn't make it any easier. The following six steps will give you a systematic approach to determining which specialty or group of specialties best fit your skills, preferences, and future career goals. First, assess your own skills. While this isn't the most important factor on our list, it can still play a key role in your interests and the practicality of matching into that specialty. Most skills can be learned, but there's also benefit to playing to your strengths. On average, we enjoy things we're good at. If you're a klutz and particularly uncoordinated, then procedure-focused specialties may not be a good fit. Next, consider the competitiveness of a specialty. If you're barely managing to get by in medical school, then the chances of you matching into something like neurosurgery or dermatology will be relatively slim. That said, I'm a firm believer that your study strategies, habits, and systems dictate the majority of your performance in college or medical school. If you're struggling, check out our study strategies playlist, which is filled with tactics and tools for succeeding in college and medical school. But you don't have to wait to find out if your current stats are competitive. SpecialtyPredictor.com shows you exactly where you stand compared to medical students who matched into your desired specialty. The prediction algorithm leverages the latest official match data to accurately predict your percentage odds of matching into that specialty. It will even identify your relative weaknesses compared to the average person in that specialty, providing personal insights that will help you prepare before it's too late. See how your stats stack up for the specialties you're most interested in. And it's not just for med students approaching residency applications. The advanced prediction algorithm converts pre-med stats to help you understand if you're on the right track. Unlock your competitiveness at SpecialtyPredictor.com. Second, what are your areas of scientific and clinical interest? What organ system or clinical questions do you find the most stimulating? If you enjoy pharmacology and physiology, anesthesia may be a good fit for you. If you love anatomy like I did, then consider a surgical specialty. If you are fascinated by the brain and how it works, then neurology or neurosurgery are natural fits. Next, assuming you want to have direct patient care, determine whether you'd like a primarily surgical practice, where the operating room is the focus of your day-to-day, or a primarily medical practice where procedures are relatively rare. Surgical specialty examples include general surgery, plastic surgery, orthopedic surgery, vascular surgery, and neurosurgery. Non-surgical specialties include internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, neurology, family medicine, and emergency medicine. On average, these specialties emphasize patient relationships and clinical reasoning, but will often require a high degree of patience. You can also opt for a middle ground like urology, dermatology, OB-GYN, or anesthesia that allows for a mix of both. While our Day in the Life and So You Want to Be series are helpful, the only way to truly determine your preference is to expose yourself to various different specialties through clerkships and clinical extracurriculars. I didn't know plastic surgery was for me until I actually experienced it firsthand. I quickly realized I wanted to be part of a procedure-focused specialty. I've always enjoyed precision, symmetry, and working with my hands even when I was younger, whether it was drawing, sculpting, or building model cars, so plastic surgery was a natural fit. Even today, after being away from plastic surgery for more than seven years, it's what I miss most. It's those connections to your passions and interests that help you find that ideal specialty for you. Next, assuming you plan to practice clinically, do you want direct patient care or indirect patient care? For example, radiology and pathology involve little patient interaction compared to direct patient care specialties, which is essentially everything else. But each has different degrees of patient interaction as well as different relationships with patients. Determine the level of patient contact and continuity you prefer. Do you enjoy talking to patients and forming long-term relationships? If so, psychiatry, pediatrics, or family medicine provides ample opportunity. Or do you prefer brief and efficient patient interactions? Emergency medicine, anesthesiology, and many surgical specialties are better suited for this preference. Next, how important is work-life balance? When I first started medical school, I remember thinking that work-life balance wasn't important. This is a common sentiment amongst pre-med and medical students. However, by the time you reach the end of medical school and have been put through the ringer, you begin to realize how important lifestyle is. It's easy to simply correlate challenging or unpredictable work hours with higher rates of burnout, but it's more complicated than that. On average, surgical specialties have much more challenging hours than non-surgical specialties, but the burnout rates are not necessarily higher in surgical specialties. The highest rates of burnout are found in emergency medicine at 63%, ob-gyn and oncology at 53%, and pediatrics and family medicine at 51%. The lowest rates of burnout are found in plastic surgery at 37%, psychiatry and ophthalmology at 39%, pathology at 41%, and otolaryngology at 43%. Factors that contribute most to burnout include too many bureaucratic tasks, such as charting and paperwork, spending too many hours at work, and increasing computerization of clinical practice. We cover specialty burnout in greater detail in previous videos linked in the description. Lastly, an often understated yet essential factor is determining the type of patients and the outcomes you are most comfortable with. During my surgical rotations, I was drawn to neurosurgery thanks to my interest in anatomy and my degree in neuroscience. However, the surprising crudeness in neurosurgery, and more importantly, the poor outcomes for neurosurgery patients, turned me off from the specialty. Consider the typical patients you will encounter in your specialty of choice. The types of patients and interactions emergency medicine physicians face on a daily basis are far different from what the average pediatrician or orthopedic surgeon faces. How comfortable are you giving devastating news to patients and their families? Will you be able to spend the greater portion of your life working with terminal patients who live with debilitating and chronic illnesses, for example, pediatric neurology or oncology? On the flip side, specialties like plastic surgery and dermatology involve fewer emergencies and life or death situations. Don't just think about what you can handle one day or one week at a time. Consider all of the long-term impacts a specialty can have on your life. Prior to pulling the trigger and committing to a career path, it's essential that you get clinical exposure. If it weren't for gaining clinical experience, I wouldn't have realized that pediatric gastroenterology wasn't a good fit for me. Your pediatric rotations will quickly tell you whether or not you're cut out for working with sick children and their stressed out parents. On the GI side, I found the specialty lacked procedural depth and variety. The scope is not nearly as technically challenging, interesting, or varied as surgery. Shadow attending physicians in your areas of interest as much as possible. Our Day in the Life and So You Want to Be series are also a great way to gain exposure and insight to different specialties. And don't forget to check out the free Specialty Chance Predictor to find out how your stats stack up for your top choice specialties at SpecialtyPredictor.com.