My undergraduate degree was in biomedical engineering and I actually worked as an aviation engineer for three years prior to going to medical school. I enjoyed the job, but it did get redundant and it was a lot of desk work, obviously. So I kind of wanted to branch out from that and that kind of plays into internal medicine with the variability in what you see. And then also with hospitalist medicine, you physically move a lot. You're all over the hospital. You're talking with people talking with patients and other team members. So it has a big social component to it too. So it's kind of a compare and contrast of being able to take a lot of the hard science and then being able to apply it to people. So kind of took the previous things I liked about my old job and was able to incorporate them into medicine now.

It checked off a lot of boxes for things that I really found important in a career first and foremost, I really like the idea of being able to be a hospitalist. And this allows you a pretty flexible schedule. You can do seven on seven off and you can also do outpatient, which would be your regular eight to five clinic. So you really get the best of both worlds with inpatient and outpatient medicine. I also really appreciate the breadth of cases that you see. And if in three years, once you're done with your residency, there's something that you really fell in love with a specific organ system. You can always go on and specialize in that.

I'm at the Cleveland clinic and my internal medicine residency program is one of the biggest in the country. So there are 45 of us. That's actually made it really nice. So you, you should be able to find friends. And the city actually has been pleasantly surprising coming from Iowa City, which has the small-town feel in a very charming way. Cleveland is very big and diverse. And there's, there's a lot here. So anything that you're looking for, but the program has been great. It's very supportive. And like I said, there's a lot of other residents. So you can find your friends.

Zoom interviews were tough and I couldn't really get a good feel for the difference between the programs. They all kind of seem the same. Now that being said, I was only applying to large academic programs. So that may also be why in that the actual programs probably weren't that different from one another. 

Something that I did was reach out to friends of friends that maybe had somebody working at that hospital, or that was a resident in that program. So you can genuinely ask them what they think and to be frank, when you're doing residency interviews, you will have these breakout rooms with residents and obviously, that's still a structured part of the interview. So no resident is going to get on and you know, tell you the things that may not be so flattering about their program. You might have to go and fish that out on your own. So yeah, if you, if you can find someone that either works at that hospital or is a resident in the program, that'll be your best indicator of the culture there.

Yeah, I think be patient with yourself the first couple of months. It's a huge learning curve, not just from a medical perspective but administrative as well, learning how to work the EMR just learning the workflow, the admin, and who to call it's it's a little bit overwhelming because even if you know the right answer from a medical textbook perspective, you might not actually know how to get that thing done in the hospital. So give it a couple of months. It's for me, it's gotten a little bit easier every day and I hope that that continues to progress. The next three years.

So they tell us for our residency that when you're rolling into your second year is when you should really start getting serious about doing research or building up a resume for the next step. And honestly, that's something that's already been on my mind as far as what do I want to do research in and QA QC or quality control is very big in internal medicine. So getting involved in the day-to-day is already a lot. So it even seems almost overwhelming to be thinking about doing additional research and projects, but that's kind of the expectation. So to be honest, that's, what's been on my, on my mind the most is building up a resume again. I know like med school was all, it was basically that, but yeah. Yes. I kind of knew it again, depending on what it is you're, you're looking to do after residency.

I'd say while you're in med school, enjoy the time off that you do get, I mean, really make the most of your time while you do have a somewhat structured schedule. Because for me, residency is usually 12 hour days, six days a week, and it's manageable, but I do miss free time from medical school. So if there's anywhere that you wanted to go or people that you wanted to see or activities that you wanted to do, take the initiative to do them in med school.