Speaker: Maggie Curran, Resident Physician, University of Kansas Health System
What is your job title and a short description of your job?
Maggie Curran: Hi, my name is Maggie korean. Um I am a resident physician in family medicine, which means that I'm currently in training to be a full fledged attending physician um here in a couple of years. Um and so I'm training specifically in family medicine, meaning I get to do lots of things like working in clinic with patients, working in the hospital with patients delivering babies, caring for kids, um kind of anything to do with general well being and medicine, I get to work with those patients.
What is one thing about your career that you CAN'T find in a Google search?
Maggie Curran: I think one of the things that surprised me the most about a career in medicine is how much flexibility there is. I was really scared when I got into it that I was never gonna have free time or social life. I watched, you know, doctors on tv that we're just always at the hospital and it's really not that way. There is so much opportunity to pick a specialty that fits well into your lifestyle, pick a practice setting that fits into your lifestyle and make it exactly what you want to be if you want to work part time and be a part time stay at home parent or be a teacher or be um someone that does a lot of service. You can make your career exactly what you want it to be. And so still having the flexibility to you know, hang out with friends, hang out with family travel, do all of those things that people enjoy doing while still having a career in medicine is very very very possible.
Tell me about the "lifestyle" of someone with your job - hours, weekends, pace, stress, etc.
Maggie Curran: So I'm not gonna lie being in medicine, especially while you're still in training. Um Like I am as a resident um is a time commitment and that all goes into just making sure that we're getting the education and the training that we need to be able to go off into practice by ourselves and not have to work as hard and not have to have quite as much stress in our lives. Um So right now as a resident position, um my life and schedule varies month to month. There will be months that I'm only working on the inpatient service maybe um logging close to 60 70 even 80 hours a week, six days a week. Um And then there are months like one that I'm on right now where it's a lot of professional development and clinic and so five days a week, 8 to 5, not a whole lot of extra time commitment outside of just normal work hours. And so um it's ever changing. It is hard work, but you're always learning um you always have great support when it comes to where your training and when you're working within whatever practice setting you're working in. Um and you can kind of find whatever pace fits best for you. Um If it's impatient things are going to be quick and you know, energetic and there's always something new going on versus clinic, It's very structured very um you know exactly what you're walking into and so there's a lot of diversity in what you see as a resident, meaning that there's a lot of diversity in the amount of hours that you're working if you're working weekends, which does happen, Um, you know, how fast paced that is, but all of that is to give us exposure. So we find exactly what we like. And then that way, when we graduate and become attending physicians, we can pick what aspects of that we want, whether that be wanting to work weekends on the inpatient service, wanting to, you know, log 60, 70 hours a week or on the flip side wanting to be the person who works clinic and only works 8-5, even, you know, just four or five days a week. Um, you really have that flexibility to do that once you get all of that exposure during training, um, and make that through to have your kind of ultimate education experience.
