Read Time: 6 minutes
At A Glance
- There’s no single way to build a career in medicine and health science.
- Medicine includes many different careers beyond becoming a doctor.
- Understanding the major paths can help you make sense of a much bigger field.
You already know you’re interested in medicine and health. Now it helps to know what’s actually inside the field.
Some careers are probably familiar. You’ve been to a doctor, met a nurse, or picked up a prescription from a pharmacist. Others happen farther from view, in laboratories, public health departments, research centers, and other places you may never see as a patient.
Consider these 10 a starting point. They won’t cover every possible career in medicine and health science, but they’ll give you a solid map of some of the major paths and what the people in them actually do.
1. Physician
These are the doctors you probably see most often: the person doing your annual physical, checking out a cough that won’t go away, or trying to figure out why you’ve been having headaches. Physicians examine patients, diagnose illnesses and injuries, order tests, prescribe treatments, and provide preventive care, usually in places like doctors’ offices, clinics, and hospitals.
“Physician” is also a huge category. Pediatricians, cardiologists, dermatologists, and psychiatrists are all physicians. Surgeons are physicians too, but their day-to-day work is different enough to deserve its own spot on this list.
2. Registered Nurse
If you’ve ever spent time in a hospital, you’ve probably noticed that nurses are often the healthcare professionals you see the most. They administer medications and treatments, monitor symptoms and vital signs, keep records, and help patients and families understand their care.
Nurses also aren’t simply carrying out a doctor’s instructions. They’re continually assessing patients and watching for changes that might require action. And while hospitals employ a lot of nurses, you’ll also find RNs in doctors’ offices, outpatient clinics, schools, nursing facilities, patients’ homes, and other healthcare settings.
Curious to give nursing a try? Explore NSLC’s Nursing program this summer.
3. Surgeon
Surgeons are physicians who specialize in treating injuries, diseases, and other medical problems through operations and procedures. Their workplace might be a hospital operating room, an outpatient surgical center, or a medical office where they meet with patients before and after surgery.
The surgery itself is only part of the job. Before entering the operating room, a surgeon has to determine whether surgery is actually the right treatment and plan how to approach it. Afterward, they monitor recovery and manage complications that may arise. Depending on their specialty, that could mean repairing a torn ligament, removing a tumor, operating on the heart, or treating a traumatic injury.
Get hands-on practice with surgical skills at NSLC’s Medicine & Health Care program this summer.
4. Physician Assistant (PA)
If you’ve ever made a doctor’s appointment and ended up seeing a PA, you already have some idea of where this career fits. PAs examine patients, diagnose illnesses and injuries, order and interpret tests, prescribe medications, and perform treatments and procedures.
You’ll find them in doctors’ offices, hospitals, outpatient clinics, emergency departments, operating rooms, and many medical specialties. PAs work as part of healthcare teams, although exactly how they’re required to collaborate with or be supervised by physicians depends on state law and the setting where they practice.
5. Pharmacist
You probably know the pharmacist as the person behind the counter when you pick up a prescription. What isn’t as obvious is how much they’re checking before that medication gets to you.
Pharmacists are medication experts. They review dosages, look for potentially dangerous drug interactions, explain how medications should be taken, discuss side effects, and contact other healthcare professionals when something about a prescription raises a concern.
Many work in the retail pharmacies you already know, including those inside grocery and drug stores. Others work in hospitals and other healthcare facilities, where they may collaborate directly with medical teams on a patient’s medications.
6. Physical Therapist
If someone is learning to walk normally again after knee surgery, rebuilding strength after a stroke, or trying to get back on the soccer field after an injury, a physical therapist may be part of the process.
Physical therapists evaluate how people move and develop treatment plans to improve mobility, manage pain, and restore function. They spend much of their day actively working with patients in physical therapy offices and clinics, hospitals, nursing facilities, and sometimes patients’ homes.
The work is part rehabilitation and part problem-solving: What can’t this person comfortably or safely do right now, and what could help them get closer?
7. Medical Laboratory Scientist
A doctor orders bloodwork because they need information they can’t get from an exam alone. In a hospital or diagnostic laboratory, medical laboratory professionals help find those answers.
They test blood, urine, tissue, and other specimens for information that can help diagnose and treat disease. That might mean examining cells under a microscope, identifying microorganisms, analyzing body fluids, or operating sophisticated laboratory equipment.
Most patients will never meet the person doing this work, but their results can answer crucial questions. Is there an infection? Are certain blood cell counts abnormal? Is a treatment changing what shows up in the lab?
8. Genetic Counselor
Despite the word “counselor,” this isn’t therapy in the way you might normally picture it. Genetic counselors help people understand inherited health risks and make sense of genetic testing and its results.
Someone with a strong family history of certain cancers, for example, might be referred to a genetic counselor to discuss whether testing for particular inherited genetic changes could provide useful information. Prospective parents may also meet with one when there is concern about an inherited condition that could affect a child.
Genetic counselors typically work with patients and families in hospitals, doctors’ offices, outpatient centers, university medical centers, and diagnostic laboratories. The job combines genetics and medicine with the ability to explain complicated, sometimes emotional information clearly.
9. Epidemiologist
Epidemiologists usually aren’t treating individual patients. They’re looking for patterns across groups of people.
Imagine several people in the same area suddenly developing an unusual illness. An epidemiologist might investigate what the cases have in common, then analyze data to understand what’s happening and help public health officials decide how to respond.
A lot of that work happens in offices and laboratories at state and local health departments, hospitals, universities, and research organizations. But an outbreak or other public health emergency can also take epidemiologists into the field to collect information and investigate what’s happening firsthand.
10. Medical Research Scientist
The medicines, tests, and treatments used in healthcare don’t simply appear in hospitals one day. Medical research scientists help build the evidence behind them.
Usually working in laboratories and offices at research organizations, hospitals, universities, pharmaceutical companies, and similar institutions, they study diseases and human health. One researcher might investigate what’s happening inside cancer cells, while another studies a potential treatment or helps conduct a clinical trial.
This is an important career to know if the science behind medicine interests you as much as treating patients does. Medical scientists aren’t usually providing day-to-day patient care. They’re working on the questions that could eventually change how that care happens.
Where Do You Start Exploring?
These 10 careers are only a starting point. There are more than 100 health careers to explore, including dentists, occupational therapists, radiologic technologists, speech-language pathologists, audiologists, respiratory therapists, healthcare administrators, and plenty of other paths we haven’t touched yet.
But you don’t need to know all of them at once. Start with the careers that made you curious enough to want another question answered. What does a genetic counselor actually study in college? What does an epidemiologist do on a normal Tuesday when there isn’t an outbreak? How different would your day be as a nurse versus a physician?
A little baseline knowledge goes a long way. You don’t need to know every career in medicine and health science, but knowing the major paths gives you a map of the field. The more of that map you fill in, the better your chances of finding the part of medicine that makes you want to keep exploring.
—
Want to explore the medical field before you graduate high school? Discover all of NSLC’s Medicine & Biological Sciences pre-college summer programs and get hands-on experience with your future.