Fourth year: What lies ahead

With just three more clerkships left in my third year (psychiatry, pediatrics, and OB/GYN), the time is quickly approaching when I will have to start making some serious decisions about my future.

The fourth year schedule is by design flexible, allowing me the freedom to choose those courses that I'm interested in and are relevant to my future career. The problem I'm faced with is figuring out my fourth year schedule when I still have more than a few possible career paths before me. Although we sign up for fourth year classes in February (so soon!), a friend told me that it's usually pretty easy to change the schedule in the middle of fourth year. That's comforting.

But it's more complicated than that. By the end of August, I will want to have completed all fourth year coursework required for applying to whatever field I choose. The Dean's Letter is written in September; residency applications are submitted in October; and I'm interviewing November-January. That means I have a short four months to play around with in my fourth year before I start working on my residency applications. Yikes!

As it stands now, my top interests (in no particular order) include: adult neurology, pediatric neurology, and internal medicine. In order to prepare myself for all of these eventualities, I would need to do the following: 1) internal medicine sub-internship (sub-I), 2) adult neurology elective, 3) pediatrics sub-I, and 4) pediatric neurology elective. Four months right there. Plus, with psychiatry in the back of my mind, I could end up wanting to do a psychiatry elective, as well.

Regardless of what I end up deciding, there will be a period of dead time between my last interviews in January 2013 and Match Day on the third Friday of March 2013, when I find out where I will be doing my residency training. Then more dead time between Match Day and graduation in June 2013, eighteen months from now.