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Medical resident: How I got my job and where I'm going

A first-generation American shares his journey from a non-academic background to becoming a physician. Inspired by the care his family received in a hospital, he pursued education at a junior college, UC Berkeley, and UCSF. After years of study, research, and preparation for medical school, he's now an intern at UCLA, heading to Harvard for a neurology residency. His advice to future physicians emphasizes the importance of a support system, learning from mistakes, and enjoying the journey.

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  • leaf orange style avatar for user sara onagh
    wow. it's quite a bit different than the system in Iran. maybe the overall period is the same but the process is different.
    first, we have a university entrance exam named konkoor at the end of the senior year (12th grade) ( we call it pre-university). you have to be in the top 1000( in the country) to get into public universities and in the top 3000 thousand to get into private schools(which is so expensive).
    in university, we have a 7-year general medicine that includes all the things that a normal physician will need that ends with the internship. after internship you have to defend your thesis to graduate as a doctor from university then you have to do 1-2 year of social services as a doctor then you can take the test to get into university to continue studying and become a specialist in whatever specialty you get accepted based on your test results.this is 3 years of residency. after this, you have to take another test to study to become a super-specialist in your area of residency that is the fellowship.
    I don't know if all of this is correct or not but it is mostly like this.
    overall it is a 17-18 year of studying to become a super-specialist.
    (10 votes)
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  • piceratops seed style avatar for user Madison Jeffries
    What education and training are required to become a medical resident?
    (6 votes)
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  • leaf blue style avatar for user The Good Doctor
    how expensive would it be to go to a top medical school?
    (6 votes)
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  • male robot donald style avatar for user 980065217
    Wow. Why does it take so long?
    (2 votes)
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    • aqualine tree style avatar for user David Alexander
      Let's see. K-12 is 13 years. The undergraduate college degree is 4 years (that makes 17). Medical School and internship is another 4 years (that makes 21) and the kind of training that leads to a residency is another 3 (totaling 24). It takes a long time, because people entrust their lives to medical residents, and we want quality.
      (3 votes)

Video transcript

I'm a first generation American. My family's from Mexico. I actually never planned on becoming a physician. I actually didn't even plan on really attaining any higher education. Really medicine wasn't at all on my radar up until I was probably in my mid, early 20s. Around that time, I had my first experience with medicine. I had a family member that was in the hospital and was in an intensive care unit for about 10 days. I just remember that 10 days, you know, the way these medical professionals came in and the level of etiquette of caring that they displayed towards the family members, knowing that it's a difficult situation. It was sort of this unreal level of customer service that I had never really seen before and I think it was really the patient physician etiquette and just overall knowledge of helping people was kind of something that sort of captivated me and being a young person and never having thought about pursuing college or becoming a physician was a very very exciting but also very very terrifying and daunting position to be in because I had nowhere really to, I had no idea where to start. I enrolled in a local junior college. I spent three years there. I studied basic general education as well as a lot of science courses, a lot of courses that were general chemistry, anatomy, biology, physics, calculus, things of that nature and then after three years at a junior college I had applied and was accepted to UC Berkeley, so I attended UC Berkeley for two years as I finished my upper divisions and so across the bay is UCSF, one of the most world-renowned biomedical and research institutions in the world and I was very fortunate to have an opportunity to go work along with a future colleague of mine that doing a research project really looking at neurological diseases. So, after I graduated from UC Berkeley I was invited to stay at UCSF during a research fellowship to continue to do biomedical research in neuromuscular disease for the next three years. Eventually, applying to medical school was my main goal and in order to do that there are a number of things that you need to do. You need to study for the MCAT, which is the medical test that's comprehensive in order to gain admission to med school. You need letters of recommendation, a personal statement, an overall application and you need to save up money to apply for such a thing. So, you typically get your application ready to submit sometime in June, maybe July. That would be your primary application. Something known as a secondary application may be offered to you. A secondary application usually is additional essays that are unique to that program, unique to their admission and maybe they want a little more reflection of you as a person, so secondary applications usually come out anywhere from August, September, October, November and then after a secondary application if the admissions committee is interested, then they would offer you an interview. You travel to the hospital and to the program. You meet the admissions committee and you interview there and then usually after the interview you wait some time. Usually it can be anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple of months before you hear whether you were accepted to the program or you could be waitlisted or you could also be rejected from the medical school program. That whole process is something that happens within a 12-month period, so from starting med school is four years itself. Internship is one year in internal medicine, three years in neurology residency and then potentially one, maybe two years as a fellow, so at the very least, from starting med school to finishing fellowship, it'll be a nine year clinical training endeavor. So, currently doing my internship in internal medicine at UCLA. After this year of training, I'll be heading to Harvard over at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Brigham and Women's Hospital where I'll be doing a neurology residency, so that'll be an additional three years where I'll be studying diseases involving the brain and spine and peripheral nervous system. So, my advice to the next generation of physicians is I would say some of the most important things is to have a really good support system and that's family, friends and then also having mentors is part of the support system because it can feel like a long road. There are a lot of classes you take as a college student. There's a lot of tests you're gonna take and I think the journey itself can be rather long, but the journey itself is incredible and most people who have done it would say it was one of the most exciting and gratifying things of their life, but my advice would be that when times are tough to reach out to those around you and there'll be mistakes that will happen. There'll be setbacks that will happen. I think that's part of the process itself. I think a lot of students think that they have to be perfect the entire time, but the reality is you're a human being and you have to learn from your mistakes and that really delivers a lot of personal growth along the process. Very rarely in medicine is it a one person job. It's a whole collaborative team effort. It's a team effort to get you into med school. It's a team effort to train you to get ready for residency and it's a team effort when you're delivering care and so that really doesn't change and so I think my advice in general to the future physician students is to be ready. It's gonna be a long ride, but it's gonna be a really fun ride and it's gonna be a unique ride. It'll be unique for everyone.