Career tips: information on pediatrician careers

So, you are interested in becoming a pediatrician? Good for you! Now, what’s next?

If you are interested in becoming a pediatrician, you should probably consider why you want to do this. If it’s because you like children (which is a common answer), you should think about if you want to go all the way through medical school and residency to work with children, when you could work with children in a different setting much sooner with far less schooling, such as being a teacher or nurse.

If you’ve already considered those other paths and are still sure that you want to become a pediatrician, that’s great. If you are starting out in high school, you would want to take as many math and science classes as possible to get into a good college. After that, you’d want to keep your grade point average as high as possible, probably volunteer with children during your college years, and do a lot of extracurricular activities to get yourself into medical school after the four years of college you need to take. Again, you would take a lot of math and biology and science classes in college to prepare for medical school. Before medical school but after you graduate from your 4 year college, you would take a test called the MCATs. This is an extremely important test that you would want to study a lot for and make very good grades on, as they are an integral part of getting into medical school.

You would of course want to get into the best medical school you could get into and afford, and keep your grades up very high during medical school as well. After medical school, you would be able to do a residency within your specialty, which in this case, would be pediatrics. You would be a medical doctor at this point, working in a hospital setting, although you would be operating under an experienced physician.

The residency would probably consist of anywhere between 3- 8 years. This is where it gets interesting. Do you want to be a pediatrician that works at a doctor’s office and sees mostly healthy patients and gives children vaccines? Or, would you like to do something else with children? There are many pediatric specialties, if you don’t want to be a general pediatrician. Would you be interested in doing pediatric surgery, pediatric heart surgery, pediatric radiology, or pediatric neurology? What about pediatric oncology? How about being an ear, nose and throat specialist, who works with children a lot of the time? There are many options for those interested in pediatrics; don’t think that your only option is to be a general pediatrician. Perhaps in medical school, you also fell in love with another specialty such as cardiology- then you could definitely consider pediatric cardiology.

As you can see, if you love children and you love medicine, there are many different options for you! Also, if you settle down in a practice, usually you can become a partner in the practice within a few years of working. This allows ownership of something you love: your own pediatric medical practice.

careers, Jobs Indonesia, Indonesia Vacancy