I love kids. In college, my advisor was a pediatrician, because I thought that’s what I wanted to be. When I was in medical school, I was the co-President of the pediatric club. During third year, I scheduled pediatrics to be my third rotation because that’s the order in which you’re supposed to do the field that you’re interested in. (You don’t want to do it too early because then you’ll look like an idiot, but not too late in case you hate it and change your mind.) I’m not a pediatrician. So what happened? Here’s why I decided against pediatrics: 1) I spent my whole damn rotation sick with URIs and GI bugs. 2) Really sick kids make me desperately sad, to the point where even doing a practice question about a child with cancer ruined my whole day. 3) I am really, really bad at looking in screaming baby ears. And that’s like half of what pediatricians do. 4) I found medicine involving non-sick kids to be really boring. Strep throat? Boring. Rashes? Boring. Otitis media? Boring. 5) Parents = mega aggravating. (Of course, now I deal with adult children, which are also mega aggravating.) 6) When I saw a cute baby, I mostly just wanted to play with the baby, kiss him all over his cute little pudgy face, and then go home and make lots of babies. And when I couldn’t do those things, I got frustrated. 7) Whenever we’d have guests at peds club, they always complained about their salary. (I saved the most shallow reason for last.) It was telling that my lowest shelf exam score the whole year was in pediatrics. Somehow it just didn’t mesh for me. Although there are certainly times when I wish I was hanging out with cute little kids all day. Source
