Finding a volunteer position in the medical field is good experience and will also help you decide if you really enjoy medicine. Start early in your college career and keep a journal of what you see. After four years in medical school, students enter into a two to six year residency program, depending upon the specialty. Family doctors require on average a three-year residency in family practice. Physicians confront many cases where, despite the best use of modern medical knowledge, the patient fails to improve and may even die.
Physicians also deal with often unpredictable, even hostile patients.
Today, another intrusion into the way physicians practice is government and insurance regulations. Yet, physicians of this era have a huge variety of new treatments and procedures which may enable them to save the lives of a patient that ten years ago may have been incurrable. If the motivations for entering medicine are simply a superficial pursuit of prestige, money, or self-gratification, the career could soon become physically and emotionally draining. However, a medical career can be one of the most gratifying professions, offering a large variety of work and an ever changing, fascinating array of possibilities. Hello from the new leaders on the premed club.