Anesthesiologist

Another common misconception about the field of anesthesiology is that you just sit in a chair the whole time and you know dial the dials and give the medications and it's boring. But the reality is that on most days there's quite a bit of pace and variety. If I'm in a day where I have many short surgeries that means that I'm seeing a patient before surgery, taking care of them and then moving on to the next case quite quickly and there's a lot of work in moving along. In addition to that I'm always part of a team. There are nurses, technicians, surgeons, physicians assistants, nurse practitioners and others that I'm interacting with on a regular basis. So it's a very team-oriented specialty and there's not a lot of sitting around. Now sure there are long cases sometimes but on average I'm moving quite a bit during the day.

One of the common misconceptions about the field of anesthesiology is that your meaningful patient interactions are limited because your patients are asleep, which of course is not true. Oftentimes an anesthesiologist comes into a patient's life at a very important or meaningful or stressful time and it's very important to be able to bond with your patient quickly and to be able to instill trust and caring toward them in a short period of time. So that includes both before surgery and of course you're caring for them during surgery and afterward. And so that during that time there are some great patient interactions and of course there are other areas of the hospital where your patient's not asleep, say labor and delivery when women are having babies or in the emergency room or other settings. So get a lot of great patient interactions.