ELi5: How/when do medical students/professionals decide what field of medicine to specialize in?

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Obviously there’s a number of factors that dictate this. I guess I’m more intrigued specifically by the fields that some might consider “less glamorous” than others.
Does one simply have a revelation- “hey I’m pretty good with guts, guess I’ll be a gastroenterologist”?
Or “I come from a long line of Podiatrists, so naturally I followed in my father’s footsteps.” (Pun intended)

In: Biology

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Im not a doctor, but I am a scientist. I figure its more or less the same way i did it: I went with the thing that interests me the most.

Microbiology started interesting me as a child, when I played the game Parasite Eve. Started me looking into it. Of course I soon realized that the stuff in the game is closer to magic instead of science, but the interest remained. And when nothing else interested me anywhere near as much, I decided to make a career out of it.

I don’t recall exactly how I ended up focusing on bacteriophage viruses specifically… I probably just thought the idea of viruses that infect bacteria was really cool. XD And it IS

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