Last night our “class mentor” had my residency class over for our quarterly dinner. He has been hosting these dinners since intern year, but they have become more meaningful lately. It’s amazing to me that I am already 3 months into my THIRD year of residency. Now the career advice is much less theoretical. I really have to start making some decisions about the next chapter of my life.
We spent alot of time talking about fellowships. I think all of my classmates have declared themselves as fellowship-bound versus generalist. Most of them have begun working on research projects, arranging away rotations and meetings with key people in our department. I have a project that I have been working on, but I’m not nearly to the point where I can publish. I feel like I am in limbo right now. I came into residency really thinking that I wanted to do a Maternal Fetal Medicine fellowship, and now that I have had more exposure, I’m just not so sure anymore. My formal “personal mentor” is one of our younger MFM attendings and my “research mentor” is an MFM attending. I love what I am doing, but I equally love doing robotic surgery and laparoscopic surgery and even a nice vaginal surgery case here and there. It’s hard to accept that by doing a fellowship to become such an expert in one arena, you must sacrifice all of the other areas that originally drew you to the specialty of Ob/Gyn as a whole.
That being said, I plan to continue working with my mentors. I have begun to talk more and more to my faculty about their careers, personal lives, and how they got there. This is a unique time in my life where I am able to shape the direction the rest of my career will go. I want to gather as many opinions as possible from these great mentors that are willing to share their experience. Hopefully things will become more clear through all of these discussions. If not, there is always the idea to be a generalist for a while to make up my mind and get my own personal life in order!
