UT Virtual View Book
UT Rockets
A University Rising
UTMC Named Regions #1 Hospital
Career Specialty Advising: Specialty Interviews
Welcome! The process of choosing a career path within the medical profession is a personal one, and it's importance cannot be understated. Many find this prospect understandably daunting, but it is helpful to know that such a decision does not come overnight. It may take an extended period of time before arriving at the best fit for your personal, intellectual, and professional goals. And, students should take comfort in the fact that the average medical student changes his or her mind more than three times about a specialty before arriving at the final conclusion.
Fortunately, a multidisciplinary team of students, faculty members, administrators, and media gurus have come together to produce a set of resources to make the decision making process that much easier. Please explore the links on the right to see interviews with faculty members in the various medical specialties. On each page you will also find descriptions from the AMA's Graduate Medical Directory and contact information for the appropriate professional association, where you can explore that specialty even further.
At the bottom of this page, please feel free to voice your opinion about this site. We are always interested in feedback for the continuous improvement of this resource.
Prefer to view this site on your iPhone or Android mobile device? Click here.
Pearls of wisdom from the Dean
Career selection is a very important part of the process of maturation for every medical student and for every health care professional in the United States and around the world. It is a dynamic and very heartfelt process which involves many different facets that occurs over a long period of time.
Frequently, medical students and other health care professionals will enter into their professional education program with a full understanding of what type of specialty, what type of physician they may want to be. They may know whether they want to be a pediatrician or a neurosurgeon, they may know whether they want to deliver babies or do cosmetic surgery, but over the course of their medical education, as they interact with other types of health care professionals, as they develop relationships with other students and classmates, as they form relationships with career mentors and with our advising and counseling services, those decisions may change. As a matter of fact, we understand that the average medical student, from the day that they wake up in the morning full of energy and say today, “I am absolutely sure that I know what I want to do. Today I know I want to be a surgeon, I want to be a dermatologist, I want to be an ophthalmologist”, then on average, they will change their mind approximately 3.2 times. So please look forward to this, enjoy this decision and understand that there is a process that you are going to go through.
