In the fourth year of medical school, I watched as, one by one, many of my classmates elected to specialize in less demanding areas (radiology or dermatology, for example) and applied for their residencies. Puzzled by this, I gathered data from several elite medical schools and saw that the trends were the same: by the end of medical school, most students tended to focus on “lifestyle” specialties—those with more humane hours, higher salaries, and lower pressures
