adelaidemedblog

Figure 1. A little photo I took of a chart on the Victor Harbour Clinical Skills trip. Flipped sideways.

I would have to say that almost every medical student will be faced with this decision, and, if you went to convention, you may have talked to people from the royal australian college of (insert specialty here) about what and how to become one of their fellows.

I am also sure, for many people applying for medicine and/or in medicine already, that they have been asked about what kind of specialty they want to do in medicine. In fact it’s even one of the interview questions at some universities. (my answer at the universities was that i clearly don’t know enough, nor have i had sufficient experience to make a decision just yet.) There is definitely a wide range of specialities to choose from and since I still don’t want to start on my Indigenous Health Assignment just yet I will procrastinate a little more.

First, take this.

Medical Specialty Aptitude Test

or not. it’s 130 questions long so it could be added to tpaitpai’s list of procrastination tools.

It does come up with a list of specialties (quite a long list actually) which are supposed to match you to the personalities of specialists already out there and give you a bit of an idea where you could go. Here are my top 10:

1 psychiatry
2 physical med & rehabilitation
3 nuclear med
4 neurosurgery
5 infectious disease
6 gastroenterology
7 cardiology
8 aerospace med
9 radiology
10 thoracic surgery

well. That isn’t quite the exhaustive list, just the top 10. It does point the same way i was thinking though (yeah, though i still clearly don’t have the experience or knowledge to make any definitive decision) - everything i have seriously considered is on that list, except for emergency medicine.

Hmmm. Psychiatry sounds very fun. It’s probably the closest thing to counselling in medicine, and I once had a friend suggest i do that. hmmm… and according to the little picture, to get there, i have to be crazy and have a long attention span.

“hell is spelt p-s-y-c-h” - pointdexter, on his psych rotation

hmmm. well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. who knows?

I still have the lanyard (along with 7 other different ones that hold my keys) from the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists to remind me whenever i bother to look at that particular one.

Feel free to post your results of the test as a comment if you wish to discuss them - it’s not spam! (yes, even if you aren’t in medicine yet.)