My new internship started this week. I'm required to write a journal entry for each week, so I thought I would share this one.
Week 1 – Inpatient Service
I had high anticipation for this rotation because Internal Medicine was a field that I thought I wanted to go into. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see any patients because somehow all of my preceptor’s patients had been discharged the previous day. Instead I was shown around the many different areas of the hospital and got a very good foundational idea of how the hospital is arranged and interacts with each other.
I also had a talk with one of the physicians about his feelings on his profession in general. He basically summed up all of the non-verbal impressions I had gotten from former physicians I shadowed by candidly telling me how miserable his field is. He told me straight that it can be a very painful profession and that I should be “pre-law.” When I asked my preceptor if it was likely that I would meet a physician that would say differently she said, “probably not.”
I don’t consider today to be a bad experience though. I was happy that the people I met were so straightforward with me. The main question I wanted answered going into this internship was “do physicians invest too much into their profession.” I found out today that it seems like they really do. As of now I’ve determined that being a PA would provide me with enough professional fulfillment, but at the same time require less of an investment of my personal life.
Yeah... I didn't hear one positive thing about being a physician. My nurse practitioner preceptor said that she keeps hearing that all the pre-med student want to become PAs and that it worried her. But at the same time she by no means endorsed the physician profession.
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