writing a career analysis research paper english

Analysis of a Career in Surgery

Student Name

Professor Williams

English 122 02H

Date Due

Outline

Thesis: This analysis will explore the education, training, and career of a Surgeon.

· Introduction

· Definition of Surgeon

· Qualities of a Surgeon

· Thesis, Purpose, and Audience

· Source and Scope of Research

· Career Analysis

· Education

· Undergraduate Degree

· Application Requirements

· Medical School

· Residency & Fellowship

· Life of a Surgeon

· Duties and Responsibilities

· Surgery

· Teaching

· Research

· Work/Life Balance

· Employment Prospects

· Career Growth

· Advancement Opportunities

· Pros and Cons

· Conclusion

· Summary of Findings

· Interpretation of Findings

· Recommendations

Analysis of a Career in Surgery

INTRODUCTION

A career as a surgeon is long, incredibly difficult, competitive, costly, and one of the most rewarding pursuits you can have in your life. Something not typically mentioned to aspiring pre-medical students is the complicated nature of applying to medical school and residency. Much more is required than just a set of good grades. Volunteer work in the community, leadership and research experience, writing and interviewing skills, are all necessary for a successful application to medical school. All of those things are required yet again, when applying to surgical residency.

Before digging into all those things, let’s look at the definition of a surgeon. The United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics describes the surgical profession in the Occupational Outlook Handbook as the following: “Using a variety of instruments, a surgeon corrects physical deformities, repairs bone and tissue after injuries, or performs preventive or elective surgeries on patients.” This is a strict definition however; a more useful outlook would be to focus on what traits lend themselves to becoming a successful surgeon.

There is a useful list created by the American College of Surgeons (ACS), titled, “So You Want to Be A Surgeon: An Online Guide to Selecting and Matching with the Best Surgery Residency,” which aims at current medical students. The guide says that a surgeon should work well as a member of a team; enjoy quick patient outcomes; welcome increasing responsibility; excel at solving problems with quick thinking; be inspired by challenges; and love to learn new skills (American College of Surgeons). The ACS recommends looking into a surgical career if you believe some or all of those traits apply to you. However, there is no such thing as a “standard surgical resident” and the ACS points out that “surgeons are trained, not born.…Becoming a good surgeon is a lifelong process.”

For students interested in pursuing a surgical career, this analysis will explore the education, training, and career of a Surgeon. Information for objective analysis will be taken from multiple sources including article databases, government sources, a personal interview with an orthopedic surgeon, the American College of Surgeons, and other credible websites. While this analysis will have a broad base of information, its scope will include an in-depth look at the education, life of a surgeon and the career’s medical prospects as to the medical school application requirements, residency, testing requirements, and a surgeons “typical” career.

CAREER ANALYSIS

EDUCATION

As a pre-med student, knowing the undergraduate requirements is vital as you don’t want to take classes you don’t need. Many students, uneducated about the process, believe that medical school requires a biology degree. However, you can get into medical school with any bachelor’s degree, provided you also meet some basic requirements.

Undergraduate Degree

All medical schools have the basic requirement of one year each of biology, general chemistry, organic chemistry, and physics. Some medical schools do have other minor requirements, which can include different humanities or sociology classes. It’s important to decide which schools you want to apply to early in your pre-med career so you can fulfill their admission requirements. All schools list these requirements on the admissions portion of their website.

Application Requirements

More than good grades are required for admission to medical school. Medical schools around the country receive thousands of applicants each year, and the school’s reputation is on the line for every student. Therefore, schools are looking for well-rounded students that are involved in their community, understand and have been involved in research, and have been introduced to the medical field, either through work experience, volunteering, or shadowing. Technically, none of this is required, but you will not be accepted without having had these other experiences. This is a good thing, as it encourages life-experienced students, which ultimately produces better doctors.

Once you actually submit your application, even if a school likes you, it’s not over yet. The school will then send you a “secondary” application, which you have to pay to submit back to them and typically includes some variety of essay questions. If you make it past this secondary application, you are then invited to interview! You will be required to drive or fly to the college to be interviewed by the selection committee. The actual interview process varies greatly between colleges, but the typical rule of thumb is that the interview begins when you walk onto campus, whether you know it or not. So always be on your best behavior! After the interview, you will eventually hear whether they have offered you acceptance or not. It is important to reply as soon as possible, lest they change their minds.

Medical School

Medical schools are as different as they are the similar. All schools are four years and, of those, you’ll have two years of course work, anatomy & physiology, pathology, histology, the list is extensive. Then you’ll have one year of rotations where you’ll experience all the different specialties of medicine. This is when you’ll be introduced to surgery for the first time, unless you had the opportunity to shadow a surgeon previously. During the fourth year, or “intern” year, you will choose a specialty or two that you will learn more about. This is the basic structure of medical school education, but each is vastly different in their approach.

Residency & Fellowship

It is now your intern year, and you have to start deciding what specialty you want pursue if you haven’t already. You’ll need to keep up with all the extracurricular activities mentioned in the application requirements section, as well as keep your marks high in medical school. Networking is also incredibly important. In fact, a paper examining the “hidden curriculum of surgical careers” by Elspeth Hill et al, a Resident Surgeon at Washington University, found that “students described relationships as fundamental to understanding how to engage in the surgical world; building a network was critical to encountering and uncovering the surgical hidden curriculum” (887). You’ll have to go through the application and interview process again, but it is a much faster process this time. Aspiring surgical residents will want to pay attention to not only the residency they’re applying to, but also where the residency is placed. As a general surgical residency is five years in length, meaning you need to tolerate where you’re living.

Fellowship is advanced training in a subspecialty, lasting from one to three years depending on the subspecialty. Fellowships are far more competitive as most only accept one or two fellows per year. Therefore, you need to be motivated and on top of your game if this is the path you want to take. The good news is after fellowship, you’re done! You can now be hired as a full-fledged attending surgeon. It only took 15 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Congratulations.

LIFE OF A SURGEON

The following will apply only to attending surgeons whom have finished residency and, possibly, a fellowship. Their typical day will vary greatly based on the specialty or subspecialty. For the sake of brevity, we will generalize. Most surgeons will regularly teach as well as perform or be involved in research in some way, besides their normal surgical duties, so we will analyze those three main tasks.

Duties and Responsibilities

The amount of the following responsibilities will be different depending on the surgeon’s focus. An academic surgeon, for instance, will do more research and experimental design, whereas a surgeon in a large urban hospital will likely do more teaching of interns, residents and fellow; and a surgeon in a more rural or underserved area will be focused almost entirely on surgery and patient care.

Surgery: A surgeon in a rural or underserved area will perform a lot of surgery and patient care. Their days will be filled reviewing cases, performing surgery, and managing patients post-surgery. They will likely have to be on-call a couple times per month or more depending on their specialty, but otherwise will be fairly in control of their schedule as an attending surgeon.

Teaching: A surgeon in a teaching hospital will do a lot of, just that, teaching. They will still perform plenty of surgery, but will likely always have interns, residents, or fellows with them. In addition, they will give presentations regularly at hospital conferences, and have grand-rounds, which is when the residents or fellows will present their case load to the attending, you, for consideration and guidance.

Research: Surgeons involved in research will perform mostly experimental surgeries. They will spend a lot of time, evaluating and designing experiments, as well as working closely with test subjects. After an experiment is concluded, they will also spend a long time evaluating and putting together their findings to, hopefully, have a conclusion worth publishing.

Work/Life Balance

As a medical student, resident, and fellow, studying surgery will dominate your life. There is so much information to absorb and so many skills to master you simply do not have time to do much else. It will be important during this time to find little things you can do to ground yourself and stay sane, but mostly, your life belongs to the hospital.

Attending surgeons are a different story. They will have greater control over, and in some cases, the ability to dictate their schedule. They will only occasionally have to be on-call, or work weekends, after all, that’s what residents are for!

In a personal interview with Dr. Ken Danylchuk, an Orthopedic Surgeon, explains that since he owns his own practice with two other surgeons his schedule is very flexible. He is able to take vacation time when he wants, and provide plenty of time for research. He also doesn’t work with resident’s or interns unless he goes to Denver, which he says, “is as few times a year as I can manage” (Personal interview).

EMPLOYMENT PROSPECTS

Surgeons are always in demand. Especially in rural and underserved areas. The need for general surgeons will continue to increase as the average population gets older and suffers more complications from comorbidities, due to the increasing prevalence of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.. Danylchuk notes that he plans to bring in two more orthopedic surgeons into his practice over the next five years, but finding board certified orthopedic surgeons that want to move to a smaller town is not an easy task (Personal interview).

USA

2014 Employment 46,000

2024 Employment 55,100

Percent Change 20%

Annual Projected Openings 2,150

Career Growth

(Fig 1:“Surgeons”)

Career One Stop estimates the that 55,100 surgeons will be needed by 2024, with 2,150 of those openings going unfilled by current estimates of surgeon training. That is a lot of positions going unfilled, considering the amount of time it takes to train a general surgeon. Other careers might have a higher percentage of positions unfilled, but the training time is likely far less.

Advancement Opportunities

A surgeon doesn’t have to necessarily wield a scalpel their entire career. There are many ways to move up the career ladder. These include becoming a chief of surgery or other administrative official, transferring to teach at a medical school, or moving into research. A lot of surgeons however continue to cut, because they enjoy it. In fact, a cardiothoracic surgeon was recently in the news for continuing to assist with surgeries until he retired at the age of 95 (Carstensen).

Pros and Cons

Everyone knows that physicians and surgeons make a lot of money per year; this is perhaps the greatest objective benefit. What is harder to measure is the satisfaction obtained from being able to cure someone’s disease in a matter of hours, by completely cutting out a tumor, removing a diseased piece of organ, or pulling someone back from the dead when they’ve been shot several times. Surgeons often refer to the “calling” of surgery. A survey of more than 800 surgeons conducted by Julia Seelandt et al. showed that to “more than 40% of all surveyed surgeons, surgery as a calling was the most often cited promoting factor for surgery as a career choice” (3).

However, there are definitely negatives. From that large salary per year, one must deduct insurance and malpractice fees, a large amount of taxes, student loans, etc. Career One Stop reflects that those bills add up quickly even when making $200,000 or more per year (“Surgeons”). Medicine, and in turn, surgery, changes constantly. One must continue to learn and master new skills and information to stay competitive and keep your patients safe. Surgery also requires that you develop certain aloof characteristics. Physician Richard Selzer states in an essay that, “In the operating room the patient must be anaesthetized in order that he or she feel no pain. The surgeon too must be anaesthetized, insulated against the emotional heat of the event so that he can perform this act of laying open the body of a fellow human being” (Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations). Overall, the pros and cons of any profession depend on your attitude, perspective and personal circumstances.

CONCLUSION

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

Becoming a surgeon is a rigorous process that demands almost all of your time, talents, and treasure. One must not only be intelligent, but also possess and develop many other qualities to be successful. However, if you truly have a passion for surgery, the path will be rewarding and instill a great sense of accomplishment.

INTERPRETATION OF FINDINGS

If a student is to be successful in a career of surgery, they will have to master the process of navigating the medical education system. Networking, communicating through effective writing, and mastering interviews will be vital. After medical school is where the real work begins as a surgeon. Sacrifices must be made to develop the skills needed to have the privilege of operating on patients.

RECOMMENDATIONS

A student considering a career in surgery should consider the following:

· Get an undergraduate degree that you have a passion for, not necessarily a hard science.

· Shadow with doctors early and often. You can never have enough exposure

· Learn to love studying and learning! You will be doing it the rest of your life.

Works Cited

American College of Surgeons. “So You Want to Be A Surgeon: An Online Guide to Selecting and Matching with the Best Surgery Residency.” American College of Surgeons, www.facs.org/education/resources/residency-search/traits . Accessed 9 Sept 2017.

Carstensen, Melissa. “100-year-old surgeon, WWII vet who retired at age 95 shares secrets to longevity” Fox News Health, Fox News, 16 Dec. 2014. www.foxnews.com/health/2014/12/16/100-year-old-surgeon-wwii-vet-who-retired-at-age-5-shares-secrets-to-longevity.html . Accessed 18 Sept. 2017.

Danylchuk, Ken. Personal interview. 20 Sept 2015.

Hill, Elspeth, et al. "You've Got to Know the Rules to Play the Game: How Medical Students Negotiate the Hidden Curriculum of Surgical Careers." Medical Education, vol. 48, no. 9, Sept. 2014, pp. 884-894. CINAHL Complete, doi:10.1111/medu.12488.

Seelandt, Julia C., et al. "The Surgeon’s Perspective: Promoting and Discouraging Factors for Choosing a Career in Surgery as Perceived by Surgeons." Plos ONE, vol. 9, no. 7, July 2014, pp. 3. EBSCOhost, Academic Search Premier doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0102756.

“Surgeon." Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations, edited by Carl C. Gaither, and Alma E. Cavazos-Gaither, Springer Science+Business Media, 2nd edition, 2012. Credo Reference, search.credoreference.com/content/entry/sprgaithers/surgeon/0?institutionId=5637. Accessed 12 Sept. 2017.

“Surgeons.” Career One Stop, State of Minnesota, 2017. www.careeronestop.org/toolkit/careers/occupations/Occupation-profile.aspx?keyword=Surgeons&onetcode=29106700&ES=Y&EST=surgeon . Accessed 7 Sept. 2017. Graph.

United States, Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Physicians and Surgeons.” Occupational Outlook Handbook, 17 Dec 2015, www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/physicians-and-surgeons.htm , 7 Sept 2017.

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