-: There are lots of different paths,
or at least a couple different paths to you
of plastic surgery.
The path that I'm on involves obviously
medical school, a four-year medical school degree
and then applying to residency programs,
that's a national organized application system
called The Match.
You send that application through that system,
you go on interviews at the
different institutions and then you rank
those institutions and they rank you and that
goes into a computer system that then spits out
through an algorithm which program you'll
be going to, so that's how I matched into that.
And then I matched into a plastic surgery
training program that's straight out of
medical school but the other route to
plastic surgery is to train as a general surgeon
or orthopedic surgeon or other five-year surgery
training program and then once you finish that
to apply to plastic surgery fellowship,
which is a three-year fellowship program.
I think it really could be anything and that
leans to my personal story becoming a resident
or a physician, which is that
I was a music major undergrad and I did
a four-year music degree and graduated and then
decided afterwards that I loved music but
I didn't want that to be my career,
and I also knew I loved the health sciences,
and found a two-year pre-med program that
I got into after that, so I did that route
to medicine, non-traditional pre-medical student,
if you will, so it took some extra time,
a few extra years of training in undergraduate,
but I thought it worked great for me.
Probably still the majority of students that
come to medical school are some kind of
science major, bio-sciences, engineering,
mathematics, but we see it all across the board,
I had colleagues in medical school that went
to business school, and did PhD programs and
other sciences as well, so it's really all
across the board and I think as long as
you're passionate about health sciences
and caring for patients and you have the drive to
go through all of the years of training that
it really doesn't matter where you're coming from
as long as you're passionate about it.