The Undifferentiated Medical Student

Science & Medicine

The Undifferentiated Medical Student (TUMS) podcast is about helping medical students to choose a medical specialty and plan a career in medicine. The list of career options available to medical students is large, but the time to explore them all is short. Moreover, mentorship in medical school is lacking, and many medical students tackle the task of career planning alone, most struggling and almost all clutching to the hope that 3rd year clinical rotations will definitively resolve their remaining uncertainties about how they want to specialize. However, having been distracted by the relentless pace of their pre-clinical curricula and specter of Step 1, 3rd year medical students are eventually confronted with the reality that there are simply too many specialties to explore in one year and that they may not even get to finish their clinical rotations before important decisions about their careers need to be made (e.g., the planning of acting internships) if they are to be competitive applicants. Thus, mentorless and clinically unexposed, many medical students are forced to make wholly uninformed decisions about their futures. By interviewing at least one physician from each of the 120+ specialties listed on the AAMC's Careers in Medicine website 1) about their specialty, 2) how they decided this specialty was right for them, and 3) for advice about long-term career planning irrespective of the specialty they went into, this podcast aims to enumerate the details of every specialty and provide virtual mentorship on how best to go about moving past being an undifferentiated medical student.