Embarking on your Doctor of Osteopathic (D.O.) Medicine journey? Dive into the Career Advisement, Networking, Development & Opportunities (CAN-DO) program, your comprehensive guide to navigating the next stage in your medical aspirations.
During your M1 year you will learn and understand yourself. You’re more likely to be satisfied in your professional life if your career matches your interests, values, personality, and skills. In medicine, these characteristics can be reflected in your preferred practice setting(s), patient type(s), medical condition(s), colleagues, and tasks and activities.
To find your fit, first explore who you are and what you want for your life, then identify those career options that will support those goals. Use the Careers in Medicine Self-Assessments to better understand yourself and support your specialty choice.
Use the Careers in Medicine tools to assess the assessments:
During your M2 year you will explore your options. Everything you do and learn during medical school contributes to the total package you submit when applying for residency. However, it's not just the events that take place (e.g., a research project, a leave of absence), but how you handle them. No one expects you to be perfect — but residency programs do expect to see that you try hard, learn from your mistakes, are open to feedback, and strive to improve.
Maximize your experiences during medical school, learning and growing as much as possible. Use these strategies to strive for positive outcomes including personal and professional development as well as to successfully recover from and move past less than ideal situations. Continue to focus and priority all of your courses.
Now that you are in the M3 year, you've completed the Careers in Medicine assessments, researched specialty options, and narrowed your choices. It's time to bring it all together and make your decision. With all the information at your disposal, you'll need to devise strategies to prioritize your values, interests, and skills.
Competitiveness can also influence specialty choice, and some say education debt and potential salary influence your decision. Here's how to consider these other influences in choosing your specialty.
You made it to your final year of Medical school. Choosing a residency is a big decision, and one that creates stress and anxiety for many students. Your residency is important because it’s a time of tremendous growth both in your clinical knowledge base as well as your professional development. Much of what you learn will come from patients. So you must find a program where you are motivated to learn and study about your patients and can become an excellent, caring, humanistic physician, as well as feel happy in your work and home environments.
There’s no one perfect residency that’s the best fit for all students — the best program for you depends on your strengths, weaknesses, goals, and personality. You must systematically approach researching and considering residencies to find programs that fit your individual needs and eventually match to a program and feel relatively happy during your time there.
Our faculty advisers, career advisers, and peer mentors are available throughout your academic career. They'll help you pursue your best match of medical discipline/career and secure your residency of choice.