 If you're watching this video, you're probably a PA student, new grad PA, or somebody that's interested in becoming a physician assistant. So you probably know that PA's work in every medical specialty, but with that freedom comes the paradox of choice. And also, FOMO. You might be asking, what's the best specialty for me? What if I choose the wrong specialty? And what if I can't find a job in the specialty and in the city that I want to live in? Also, what if a specialty I don't like as much pays much better, should I still give it a shot, work in that specialty? These are all very valid concerns, and so how do you choose a specialty as a physician assistant? Let me see if I can help you with that. The first thing to consider is where are you in life and what's important to you? Are you single? Married? Do you have kids? Do you really want to work in a certain town or city to be near family and friends? Is that important to you? Or can you move anywhere in the country? How important is money to you right now? Would it make a huge difference to you to make 10, 20, $30,000 more? Or are you currently prioritizing learning and becoming the most well-rounded best provider that you can be? You may have heard that when choosing a first job as a physician assistant, you get to pick two out of the three. Location, salary, and specialty. And that's pretty accurate. So if you have to stay in a certain specialty or you're in debt up to your eyeballs and you really need that higher salary right now, so specialty might not even be something that you should consider right now. So the first thing you should do is take some time to objectively look at your life, what's important to you right now, and use that as a guide to choose a specialty as a physician assistant. The second thing to consider is your health, your own physical body. As medical providers, we spend so much time and energy helping other people be healthy that we often neglect our own bodies. And unfortunately, we only get one body per lifetime, so we need to take care of ourselves. The reason I'm asking you to consider your health is this. Your body may dictate what you can and can't do for long periods of time and therefore where you can and can't work. What kind of environments you can and cannot work in for a long period of time. So if you're like me and you have a service-connected low back injury that makes it impossible to stand for long periods of time without pain, then maybe a surgical position is just not a good idea. So personally, I already knew this going into PA school, but it definitely got confirmed when I did my surgery rotation and my back started to hurt and get stiff after like one hour in the OR. And then when I had to take part in longer procedures, up to six hours, I think one was like seven hours, my back started to hurt tremendously, and I just knew that that wasn't for me. So I knew for a fact that I could not take a job where I'd have to be in the OR. I could probably take muscle relaxers, painkillers and deal with it, but why would I want to torture myself? I simply knew that surgery was not for me. The good thing about this, and I guess kind of the bad thing about this, is eliminating surgical positions actually eliminated at least half of the physician assistant jobs out there for me. It made it much easier to choose a position. So take stock of your health, the things that you can and cannot do physically, and use this to help you decide what certain jobs are for you and which ones are not. So now that we figured out what's important to you and what your body is capable of, let's consider one more thing, and that is what you actually enjoy doing. Do you enjoy a fast-paced environment or does that stress you out? Do you thrive on instant gratification and you need answers today? Or do you like to play the long game and see things happen over time? Do you like forming long-term deeper type of relationships with multiple people? Or are you kind of more of a social butterfly and you prefer that most of your relationships be surface level and you like to get to know lots and lots of people, but on more of like a surface level kind of a relationship, not super deep and digging into like what makes them tick and why they do the things that they do, but more just like, hey, how you doing? Oh, this hurts, okay, let's fix it, boom, move on. Nothing is wrong with either one of those. None of these characteristics are good or bad, and there is room for all of them in the medical field. So it might be obvious to you that someone who prefers a fast-paced environment would do well in the ER or urgent care or even like a busy family practice or specialty clinic. Someone who prefers to take things slow might prefer a smaller family run type of clinic or maybe something ultra specialized like oncology that requires more time with each patient. These jobs are out there. You just need to know what it is that you want and look for that. And last but not least is what you're actually interested in. Yeah, I know it might be weird to make this the last thing you consider. You would think that this would be the first thing you consider what you're interested in, but it really is the last thing that you should consider and here's why. I have met countless medical and PA students, pre-med and pre-PA students, all of whom were very certain that they wanted to work in a specific specialty, and then years later they're doing something completely different. What you're intellectually curious about and what that specialty practically entails are two completely different things. For example, I think psychiatric disorders are tremendously interesting and I enjoy the little bit of psych I'm able to do as a primary care provider, but what I want to work full time in psych, absolutely not. No way. At least not the way that psychiatric care is delivered currently in our current system. If it changes sometime down the line, I might be interested, but right now, absolutely not. No way. You might be interested in cardiology, but then after working in cardiology for a while, you see that it's actually rather depressing, and although you are very interested in how the heart works and everything intellectually, the practical aspect of working in cardiology is boring and frustrating and you'd rather do something else. Not saying anything bad about cardiology, some people love it, but just as an example, you know, just because you're interested in something intellectually does not mean that you will like the practical aspects of working in that field. So you should definitely consider what you're interested in, the topics you found most fascinating in medical school or PA school, but take that with a grain of salt and make sure that you get a rotation in that specialty or at least go shadow in that specialty, preferably multiple offices working in that specialty so you could see the nitty gritty, the day-to-day grind of what working in that specialty actually entails. So there you have it, guys. That's four things to consider when choosing a specialty as a physician assistant. I'll see you in the next video.