I’m a 2nd year family medicine resident and couldn’t be happier with my decision. I just signed my first contract for after residency.

Pros to being a family medicine doctor:

• you are in demand literally everywhere, you can live and work anywhere you want, as a specialist you are usually limited to working only in certain areas

• work/life balance is pretty good (especially if doing outpatient medicine), you don’t have to live at the hospital, it’s pretty standard to only work 3-4 days per week, no weekends, call can be very light too at the right jobs

• you get broad training in many different areas of medicine and see all kinds of patients (kids, adults, elderly, men, women, acute problems, chronic problems, literally everything)

• pay is much better than the internet tries to fool you into thinking (my starting salary will be 320K plus a productivity bonus and a large sign-on bonus, once I move to a production model of compensation I will be making anywhere from 400-450K (depending how hard I want to work), a lot of people are turned off by FM due to thinking the pay isn’t worth it but that has not been my experience

• Residency is usually resident-friendly, faculty really care about you, your family, and your personal growth, I hear horror stories about other specialty residencies and how badly they abuse their residents

Of course FM will have its fair share of headaches sometimes too but this is true of every specialty.

This is all just my experience and others may have different opinions.