How to Become an Emergency Room Doctor

It is not easy to become an emergency room doctor. The path is long and grueling, taking well over ten years after completing high school. Those who do make it are faced with one of the toughest jobs around. An emergency room doctor is responsible for holding the lives of their patients in their hands, sometimes quite literally. Let's take a look at what it takes to become an emergency room doctor.

The first step in becoming an emergency room doctor is to go to college. You are going to need a degree from a four year college or university. You Bachelor's degree can be in any major you choose. Contrary to popular opinion, you do not have to have a science degree to become a doctor. In fact, many medical schools look favorably at students who have "different" degrees. I'm a doctor and my undergraduate degree is in English. I have known several people in medical school who were history majors, music majors, and even an aerospace engineering major.

More important that your degree in college is your performance. You absolutely must do well in your coursework. No one is going to let you become an emergency room doctor if you have bad grades. This doesn't mean that people who aren't good in a formal academic setting aren't capable, but those are the rules which have been established. If you want to be a doctor, you have to play the game, even if it's not fair. Pick a degree that you enjoy and that you will do well in.

The average age of a starting first year medical student in America is 25. This means that most students to not apply to medical school immediately on graduating from college. Most people take a couple of years to work and gain some real-world experience. Although this is not absolutely necessary, it can be important to developing the proper maturity needed to be a good doctor.

Before you apply to medical school, you have to take a standardized exam known as the MCAT, or Medical College Admissions Test. For details on taking the MCAT, see THIS ARTICLE.

The MCAT is one of the hardest exams you will have to take up to that point in your academic career. It's a real bear. It's a day long exam that covers a wide range of topics in the basic sciences. There is a lot of chemistry, biology, physics, organic chemistry (yuck!), and even reading and English. Lately, there has been a push to change the MCAT to include more topics on genetics and molecular biology.

Make no mistake, the MCAT is hard. Very hard. You are completing against the best students in colleges nationwide. It was the first test I ever took which I was not able to do well on just on the basis of being a generally bright person. You can take the MCAT more than once, but beware, medical schools can see the results of each attempt and factor that in to their admissions decisions.

After taking the MCAT and getting your undergraduate degree, you have to apply to medical school. This can be a very humbling experience, as the rejection rate is quite high. For more information on the process of getting in to medical school, see THIS ARTICLE.

Medical school itself is a wild experience. You will work harder than you can imagine. There are no "majors" in medical school. As such, you will learn as much as you can about every aspect of medicine. You are not yet ready to learn about Emergency Medicine in particular, although a rotation through the ER is likely at some point in your medical school experience.

In your last year of medical school, you begin the process of applying for your first job as a doctor. This process is different than just about every other career in the country. You enter a process known as the Match. This is a somewhat complex way of matching graduates to post-graduate residency programs. Residency is where you learn to become an emergency room doctor.

There are two slightly different residency paths you can go down to become an ER doctor. Some residency programs will accept a newly graduated medical student directly in to their program. Other programs require that you work for a year in a "preliminary" position. This serves to give a doctor more experience before they are thrown in to the chaos of a busy emergency room. Either path is a perfectly acceptable way to becoming an ER doctor. Both ways have advantages and disadvantages. As you get closer to this process, you will have many chances to learn more about it.

Residency training for an emergency room doctor can take bewtween three and four years. During this time you are a real doctor, earning a real (although small) paycheck. It's sort of a hybrid between being a student and a doctor who is on their own.

So there you are, the path to becoming an emergency room doctor. It's not easy, but it can be a highly rewarding job. Best of luck!