New Beginnings

This is the first week of ISM where actually began to look at the prospects of my own career. This week I looked at various documents on how to help myself better understand my career. It was both motivating and demotivating at the same time. On one hand I was so excited to see all the duties that I could be potentially doing in the future. It was amazing to see how much pediatric surgeons could actually affect the world with just a simple surgery on a kid. As I continued with my research I began to see more and more cases where a pediatric surgeon could affect not just a child's physical health but their mental health as well. This was so interesting to me because it's incredibly easy to see a doctor change a person physically. Any doctor can do this because it involves simple biological and medical procedures.

But I realized in order to stand out, you have to keep the patient at a proper mindset. To keep the patient positive and hopeful is the only way you can make the patient keep fighting.It is one of the things that I want to observe in a mentor as I know it cant be physically taught but acquired. And I hope to be able to acquire this talent as a doctor in the future. By knowing this I felt like I was in on a secret of the profession and it made me hopeful. But at the same time it felt as though the more I researched, the less I realized I knew. Previously, I had assumed that pediatric surgery would be very similar to general surgery but it would be more focused on kids. What I did not realize was that pediatric surgery is such an incredibly intensive field in medicine. It is highly competitive with only one to two fellowships open in each state. In fact it requires more training and schooling than general surgery. It made me question, already, if I was on the right path. I was afraid that I was going to be studying an entire year on a career topic that I clearly could never achieve. But then I kept going back to the positive. The chance to impact a life.With that I realized that I was just intimidating myself. Everybody starts somewhere and even though it might seem extremely difficult now before I know it I will be where I set myself out to be.

With hard work and determination I can and will be able to say that I am a pediatric surgeon. And I have so many questions before I get there. Like why is there such an emphasis on mental health in adolescent patient compared to adult patients? Or why does pediatric surgery require additional training on top of general surgery? And why does pediatric surgery have so little fellowships and attending currently? So this week I did learn a lot about my profession and the lifestyle and rigor that comes along with it. But even with all that research I still wasn't able to find a specialization in the Pediatrics field. At this point I am sticking with general pediatric surgery but that may change as the weeks come by. As I continue this journey, I am very excited to see what future decisions I will make about my career and how they will affect the specification of some what specialization I choose