Objective: To demonstrate that it is possible to identify the cohort of students in their first year of medical school from which future psychiatrists will be recruited.
Method: During a 3-year period, all first-year medical students at the University of Maryland completed a form indicating their specialty preference. Of those students, 403 pursued the regular psychiatry curriculum, and 34 participated in an enriched behavioural science and psychiatry program. Specialty was chosen after graduation.
Results: The higher the first-year student ranked psychiatry as a preferred specialty, the more likely the student was to choose psychiatry as a career after graduation. This was true both for students in the regular psychiatry program and for those in the enriched program. Students in the enriched program were significantly more likely to choose psychiatry as a career than were "regular" psychiatry students who gave psychiatry the same ranking in their first year. Freshman students who ranked psychiatry 4th or lower were not likely to choose psychiatry, no matter how much encouragement they received from their psychiatry departments.
Conclusions: 1) Specialty preferences in the freshman year are predictive of future career choices. 2) An enriched medical school program in psychiatry can increase the number of graduates choosing careers in psychiatry. To help resource-poor medical schools increase the number of American medical graduates choosing psychiatry, the authors propose 2 inexpensive enriched programs.