Deciding what u want to be for the rest of your life is something easy you do at a young age. When you’re at the tender age of about five years old and your kindergarten teacher asks you what you want to be when you get older a lot of kids say they want to be a police officer, firefighter, doctor, or dentist. However, when you get to your ladder years of high school and first few years in college determining what you want to do when u get older is something hard to decide on.
When u put it into perspective you’re going to school for four years, or in some cases more depending on your career choice, and all the training and hard work you put in those years hopefully grant you the outcome you succeed. If you make a mistake and happen to choose the wrong career and you don’t like anything about it you’ve basically wasted a good chunk of your life. This is the reason you have to carefully choose your major and conduct thorough research into what you plan on doing the rest of your life. I myself am stuck in the crossroads into what major I want to declare and pursue and work in the rest of my life.
This is not a decision that can just be made within an hour and it needs an investigation not just an answer to be given. In conducting the research for this paper and my love of sports I came across a major that intrigued me, this major would be that of sports medicine. Also another deciding factor in me thinking about declaring this major is my personal experience with sports medicine. When I was in junior high school I was on the football team. During my stay on this football team I tore cartilage in my shoulder and suffered bone bruising in the same shoulder.
After I was able to take my arm out of the sling I had to enroll myself into physical therapy to strengthen my shoulder back up to its normal state after not using it for a 6 week period. My experience with this really opened my eyes to this field and always had my mind on it when I was asked what I wanted to do when I got older. To obtain a sports medicine degree it requires a lot of patience, hard work, and dedication. It’s not a basic degree that you obtain in a four-year school. To become active in a field of sports medicineyou will need the same training as any other student trying to become a doctor in the medical field.
This means that you need a four-year premed degree. Once you obtain this degree you will then need to pass the difficult Medical College Admissions Test, followed by four years of medical school, two years of residency and three to five years of fellowship. Certification is the final step. Meeting all of these requirements will mean that your sports medicine will take anywhere from twelve to fifteen years to complete. (ehow). Now this is a long part of someone’s life. If you aren’t dedicated to this one particular field than you should consider pursuing another career choice.
Pretty much any career choice in the medical field will be a long and vigorous one. If you aren’t someone that’s loyal to one particular goal than you should shy away from this major. Residency is where you will determine whether or not you wish to specialize in non-surgical sports medicine or orthopedic surgery. An internship with an athletic team, sports association or an athletic medicine-focused hospital provides a potential sports medicine doctor with the knowledge and experience needed to perform well while completing residency. In a fellowship, you will spend the majority of your time learning about sports injuries.
These fellowships last two years. Those who choose orthopedic surgery, however, spend five years in a fellowship assisting surgeons. Because the care of athletes goes beyond joints, muscles and bones, to complete a sports medicine degree you will be required to take the following classes in conjunction with your medical science courses; cardiac rehabilitation, general radiology, and orthopedic surgical technique. Sports medicine is also known as exercise science. This is a broad discipline and there are many areas of study and specialty fields.
There are many options for students as well as educational requirements. If you are considering specializing in sports medicine you may want to volunteer in a sports medicine clinic while still in high school in an attempt to find the area in which you feel you would be best suited. If you are out of high school, it may be possible to volunteer at a nearby university that has a sports med department. (ehow). One of the main careers in sports medicine is physical therapy. Physical therapy is one of the fastest growing careers that are going on today.
This would be the field that I would be interested in due to the fact that I experienced it first hand and was pleased in the way I was treated and the tremendous progress I made when I completed my training. Also becoming a physical therapist will allow me to work with sports related injuries, which is what I hope to be dealing with. I know that becoming a professional athlete will be something that I will never accomplish in my lifetime but if I could be around professional athletes and help them progress in their careers that is something that I would hold very near and dear to my heart.
Being the physical therapist trainer for the New York Yankees would be the job that I would dream of holding. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the employment for of physical therapists is expected to grow much faster than any other professional occupation through 2014. (education-portal). This is another main reason I will more than likely pursue a career choice in sports medicine. When choosing a major and looking through the jobs offered by completing a degree in the field successfully the earnings for a job in physical therapy is very intriguing.
In 2004, the median annual earnings of physical therapists were about $60K, while the highest paid was about $88K per year. (education-portal). These annual earnings would intrigue anyone to pursue this career choice. However what you have to keep in mind is the fact that getting to that point is a long and vigorous path. This isn’t a job just handed out to anyone. If you’re a hard worker than that will eventually pay off in the end and you will be rewarded handsomely. To break this down in simpler terms will make it easier to see why choosing this career is very beneficial and that it has few negatives as compared to the positives it offers.
First the positives; first off the salaries that are given out to someone in this field are very lucrative. Not many fields offer salaries at this level and if they do they don’t give you the satisfaction that you take out of being a physical therapist, which leads up to the next positive it leaves on you. The fact that you will be helping others progress from injuries that have been suffered and ease them towards living a normal life once again is something not a lot of people can say they do at their jobs every day. Another benefit of being involved in this field would be for me personally that you are surrounded by sports.
Whether you’re fortunate enough to be assigned as a team physical therapist or you’re helping athletes get to their ultimate goal of making the pros or trying to stay in the pros. However, with positives come a few negatives. Not everything goes without some sort of downfall being associated with it. The major negative if you will would have to be the amount of school you need to go through. After everything is all said and done as a for mentioned you will be twelve to fifteen years older. This would be a point in which people would look over in their research and perhaps turn them away from pursuing a career in this area.
With a lot of schooling also comes a lot of money being put into an education. An education nowadays isn’t something that a lot of people are able to afford and with four plus years of schooling and books to pay for this will also be an area that might scare people away from this major. Lastly, the fact that you have to study the same topic for at least twelve years it could bore you and make you want to change your mind halfway through the experience which could turn out to be the wrong decision in the long run.
With that being said you always have to think about what’s going to happen in the long run. When it comes down to deciding on what your future will be like you need to really grasp it and take it seriously. There is no room for error and slacking in certain areas isn’t something that should be done either. When choosing a career you need to research it thoroughly and make sure you can see yourself doing it for an extended period of time. You can’t just select a career choice because it pays lucratively.
You need to make sure you’re happy in your career choice and that when you wake up in the morning you look forward to going to your job that day. If you aren’t happy doing something than you shouldn’t be doing it at all. Bibliography “Sports Medicine Doctor: Educational Requirements”. education-portal. 12/8/0<http://education- portal. com/articles/Sports_Medicine_Doctor%3A_Educational_Requirements. html>. Kirsch, Kim. “Education Required for a Sports Medicine Degree”. eHow. 12/8/09 <http://www. ehow. com/about_5279603_education-required-sports-medicine-degree. html>.