When she was a child living on a ranch in Montana and attending elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse with four other children, a career as a physician didn’t occur to KayCee Gardner. She’d never needed one.
For a long time, says Gardner, 31, “I didn’t even know doctors existed.” However, she says that she always “enjoyed doctoring our cows.”
Gardner’s plan as she went off to Montana State University was to become an engineer. But she soon got the feeling that the work would lack the humanitarian rewards she craved. Searching for a better fit, she shadowed an X-ray technician and later a doctor on a Northern Cheyenne reservation. Both experiences impressed upon her that it must be possible to prevent a good many health conditions by giving people better access to physicians.
[Check out thetop medical schools for rural medicine.]
According to the National Rural Health Association, just 10 percent of doctors practice in the wide swath of America where nearly a quarter of the population lives. The shortage of rural doctors has only grown more acute as the Affordable Care Act has expanded the ranks of people with insurance.
Gardner decided on medical school at the University of Washington and participated in a new track that would lead her to primary care in a rural and underserved area. She was assigned a mentor and sent to work in a small town before school even started. The first week, she delivered a baby.
Gardner graduated in 2012, did her residency at Montana Family Medicine in Billings, and is all set to begin practicing in Miles City — population 8,000 — this fall after she wraps up a rural medicine fellowship with a focus on high-risk obstetrics. That should help equip her for the huge range of tasks she expects to face — everything from putting tubes in tracheas to treating trauma patients and performing cesarean sections.
[Get tips on when to determine a medical school specialty.]
Prospective students can consider other hot jobs in the medical arena as well.
— Physician assistant: With the expanding demand for health care services, the need for physician assistants is projected to rise by 30 percent in the next 10 years, according to government data — growth that is “much faster” than the overall average.
The job, which involves diagnosing and treating patients and can include writing prescriptions, typically requires a master’s degree and a license. The median pay is just under $96,000.
[Learn about schools with top-ranked physician assistant programs.]
— Oncologist: Cancer continues to be a formidable foe, and since oncologists “tend to follow their patients for years and years,” says Colleen Christmas, associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, “they have a reduced ability to take in new patients.” Rapid discoveries in genomics and immunology, for example, make the field a dynamic one. According to the physician network Doximity, oncologists’ pay averages $353,000.
— Geriatrician: There are currently some 7,400 geriatricians in the country for every 2,526 Americans age 75 or older, according to the American Geriatrics Society. But thanks to the aging population and a “plateauing” of the number of these specialists, that ratio is expected to sink to one for every 4,484 people in 2030.
After they finish medical school and residency, geriatricians typically spend at least one additional year studying conditions specific to aging.
This story is excerpted from the U.S. News “Best Graduate Schools 2017” guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.
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