After gaining acceptance into medical school, you reach the next hurdle along the path…surviving medical school. There is no guarantee that a student will graduate after four years of medical school. The possibility always exists for a student to fail out, be dismissed from the program, or simply drop out. That is why a student must continue the same hard work and dedication that got him there in the first place. The challenges of medical can be tough and difficult to prepare for. According to Dr. Abdul-Laitf, who is an endocrinologist at the Children’s Hospital in Birmingham and professor at UAB School of Medicine, the challenges of first and second year students is different than third and fourth year students. He claims that first- and second-year …show more content…
Basically, the second half of medical school is where the hands-on practice is concentrated. In addition to graduating medical school, to be medically certified one must pass the step on exam, taken at the end of the second year, pass the step two exam which is taken at the end of the fourth year, and finally the step three exam which is after internship. After all of this you will be a certified doctor, but this is still not the end of the journey for someone wishing to pursue orthopedic surgery. For someone to specialize in surgery alone, they must complete five to six years of residency. Residency is where you are working in a specified area of medicine and you are the person who can make the important decisions regarding patient care. In residency, you work many hours and are also on call most of the time. According to Dr. Heller, you don’t “get much sleep during residency, but most of us were young, energetic, and passionate about what [they] were doing, so [they] survived”