The Job Hunt I

The job search can start incredibly early for residents or fellows transitioning into practice. We are often intimidated by the process because it's so open-ended and vague. Up until now, our paths have been defined and prescribed. When applying to medical school, most of us choose the "best rated" school we get into (though I'm not sure how good such measures are). Because residency is determined by a match, we apply to many places but get told where we end up. Jobs, on the other hand, are entirely different. For those of us not going into academic practice, choosing a job has a myriad of variables and a flavor of subjectivity that scares us. How strongly do we weigh location, salary, call schedule, scope of practice, culture of the group, first impression, or prestige? With a rolling schedule of hiring, do we take the first job we get or hold out for something better? This is our first opportunity to make a real salary; some of us tell ourselves we have to get it right. But unlike medical school and residency, jobs are not set in stone, and outside of medicine, people change jobs and careers frequently. As a first job, we don't even know what we're looking for. We know how to rate educational experiences and training environments, but actual practice is very different. Whereas we want complex patients and difficult cases to learn from, we may not want to make that our everyday job. When you combine such uncertainties with the perfectionist personalities that go into medicine, you can easily see why we are so stressed about the job hunt.