Personal and Family Factors Influencing Specialty Preference of Medical Students

A medical career begins with encircling a broad range of study, eventually narrowing down to specialization and sub specialization. Fairly little is recognized about evolution from the medical student to the specialist. However number of studies has been conducted on career choices still very less data is available in this field. Keeping this in mind researcher has formulated the following objectives. To study specialty preference of medical students; to identify personal and family factors influencing speciality preference of medical students. 677 final year medical students of 10 north Indian medical colleges. A self-administered questionnaire was used for data collection. A descriptive survey based study was conducted. Data analysis was done using Microsoft Excel. Frequency, Percentage and was used to presents the data. According to the level of preference scores computed for each career preference, surgery and internal medicine was preferred by majority of respondents were as a few selected diagnostics and other specialty. Coming over the personal factors majority of medical students were highly influenced by self interest and name and fame, where as only a few were influenced by social service and health history where as in family factors majority of medical students were highly influenced by care of the family and parental wishes and least influenced by family occupation and health history of family members. Opposing to the trendy belief that career choices are made after internship, this study explained that these are made within and even before entering to medical school. These choices are influenced by numerous factors.