Factors affecting senior medical students’ career choice

OBJECTIVES: To gain insight into factors affecting career preference and career choice during the final phase of medical school, above and beyond a model that was presented by Bland and colleagues in 1995 (the "Bland model"). METHODS: A qualitative study was conducted. One-hour semi-structured interviews were conducted with final-year medical students about career preference and the factors influencing preference and choice. The interviews were transcribed and a thematic analysis was applied, to identify patterns and interrelationships in the data and to compare and contrast these with the Bland model. RESULTS: Twenty-four students participated. Three critical sets of factors, not present in the Bland model, emerged from the interviews: (a) factors arising from student-initiated information collection, (b) patient population characteristics of a specialty domain, and (c) the characteristics of teams and colleagues within a specialty. CONCLUSIONS: Students appear to actively match and calibrate perceptions of different specialty characteristics with their current personal needs and expected future needs, and to include cues from self-initiated information collection about a speciality. This agency aligns with Billett's workplace learning theory. Next, specialty patient population features appear to be taken into account; this was not unexpected but not included in the Bland model. Finally, the characteristics of teams and colleagues of a specialty were stressed in the interviews. These three components broaden the applicability of the Bland model--originally created for primary-care careers--to medical specialties in general.