Objectives To understand what medical students consider when choosing their specialty, prior to significant clinical exposure to develop strategies to provide adequate career counseling. Methods A cross-sectional study was performed by distributing optional questionnaires to 165 first-year medical students at the University of Ottawa in their first month of training with a sample yield of 54....

BACKGROUND Today, women constitute about half of medical students in several Western societies, yet women physicians are still underrepresented in surgical specialties and clustered in other branches of medicine. Gender segregation in specialty preference has been found already in medical school. It is important to study the career preferences of our future physicians, as they will influence th...

OBJECTIVES This study draws on an in-depth investigation of factors that influenced the career decisions of junior doctors. SETTING Junior doctors in the UK can choose to enter specialty training (ST) programmes within 2 years of becoming doctors. Their specialty choices contribute to shaping the balance of the future medical workforce, with views on general practice (GP) careers of particula...

OBJECTIVE The selection of a future medical specialty is a challenge all medical students face during the course of their studies. Students can choose from more than sixty specialties after graduation. There is usually no structured career counselling program available at German medical faculties. So far only little data on acceptance, formats and effects of different career counselling program...

PURPOSE We are entering a new era of medicine in which an equal number of men and women are becoming doctors. Many factors combine in complex and poorly understood ways to influence a medical student's career and choice of specialty. This study investigated the preferences of medical students with regard to specialty and examined differences between genders. METHODS We administered a survey t...

BACKGROUND Family and community medicine (FM) became a recognized specialty in Spain in 1978; however, most medical schools in Spain still lack mandatory core courses in FM. In order to explore the perceptions, expectations and level of information amongst medical students in Spain in relation to FM and PC, and the training in these areas in the curriculum of the Medical Schools, a survey was d...

In the context of doctor shortages and mal-distributions in many Western countries, prestige and lifestyle friendliness have emerged as significant factors for medical students when they choose a medical specialty. In this study, we surveyed two samples of Australian medical students and had them rank 19 medical specialties for prestige (N = 530) and lifestyle friendliness (N = 644). The presti...

emergency medicine is a relatively new specialty in iran. therefore, the general public and the medical community do not have enough information on its duties, capabilities, its nature, and its work schedule or its degree of occupational difficulty compared to other specialties. hence, an insight from the early group of residents who selected this specialty can help identify the strengths and w...