An inside look at medical students’ posts on Reddit is giving new insight into how radiology is perceived among candidates looking to pursue medicine as a career.
The ‘r/medicalschool’ subreddit (on Reddit.com) is one of the largest online social forums for medical students to share their experiences and discuss a variety of topics relative to their education and career trajectory. Within that subreddit, experts recently identified several common themes pertaining to medical students’ perceptions of pursuing radiology as a specialty, including what factors encourage and deter students’ interest in the field.
The findings were published recently in Current Problems in Diagnostic Radiology.
“Understanding the reasons behind students’ choice to pursue, or not pursue, radiology and the role social media websites like Reddit play in that decision-making process helps programs and faculty to better attract and mentor students,” corresponding author Catherine C. Shoults, with the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and colleagues noted.
The team used state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) to identify conversations related to radiology as a career. They analyzed posts made between 2009 to 2022 before settling on 2,000 radiology career-related posts and 1,542 off-topic posts.
Terms found to be positively associated with radiology careers included “procedure,” “lifestyle,” “income,” “fit,” “personality,” “anatomy,” “tech,” “physics,” “research,” and “match.” Negative sentiment was most often associated with words like “AI,” “burnout,” “culture,” “job market,” “midlevel,” “sue” and “teleradiology.” The word “procedures” was regarded with the highest sentiment, while “AI” rendered the most negative outlooks.
In regard to the negativity associated with the term “AI,” the experts suggested that this is likely due to the notion that AI algorithms could one day acquire the skills needed to perform many of radiologists’ tasks—a notion that has thus far proven to be untrue.
Nonetheless, “the fear that the advancement of machine learning could lead to a decline in job opportunities for radiologists in the future has made radiology a less desirable specialty for some students considering entering the field,” the group suggested.
These opinions of radiology as a career, whether positive or negative, could shape the way medical students decide on which specialty to pursue, which is something that resident programs and radiology faculty should pay attention to, the authors concluded.
“Reddit is a popular social media forum amongst medical students, and it is important to analyze medical students’ discourse on the website and understand the reasons behind students' decisions to pursue or not pursue radiology.”
The study abstract is available here.
In addition to her background in journalism, Hannah also has patient-facing experience in clinical settings, having spent more than 12 years working as a registered rad tech. She joined Innovate Healthcare in 2021 and has since put her unique expertise to use in her editorial role with Health Imaging.