One of the best things about being a doctor in the US is the ability to work in any part of the country you want. Whereas many other professions require you to live and work in one of the major cities, doctors can pretty easily find work anywhere they want, whether it is living by the beach, in the mountains, or wherever.
This is what I was thinking when I decided to move to New York City with Leticia 4 years ago in 2021. I had just finished internal medicine residency and was ready to move to New York and pick one of many amazing job offers that I thought would be available for me. However, one thing that I did not account for was that during Covid, a lot of hospitals stopped hiring doctors, and the job market in New York City was actually very bad. First, I went online to Indeed.com and looked at hospitalist job offers. Some of the offers were in upstate New York, farther out in New Jersey, or other places like Long Island. I realized I would not be able to do these jobs if I was living in Manhattan, so I moved on and kept looking. When I did see some good job offers in Manhattan or Brooklyn or Queens, I would email them and often hear no response. There was one job in Harlem that did respond to me, but when I spoke with the director on the phone he told me that the salary would be $180,000 (which is way below average for hospitalists) per year, that I would be working Monday-Friday and also covering many weekends, and would be on call overnight for phone calls from nurses. This phone call freaked me out, as I was not expecting such a horrible job offer to exist anywhere in the country, and I figured that maybe the jobs in New York City wouldn’t even be worth it. Maybe I would do locums for much of the year, and fly to Alaska to work a bunch of high paying night shifts and then come back to New York for periods of time!
It was then that I decided to use plan B: use recruiters.
When you are in your final year of residency, recruiters will usually somehow get your email address and bombard you with emails about random job offers all over the country. I was at my lowest low, so I actually decided to answer one of the recruiters to see if they had any job openings in the New York City area. Luckily enough, she responded to me and told me that a hospital in Newark, New Jersey was looking to hire new hospitalists since they had had a really tough time during Covid and many people had quit. I looked on the map, did some math in my head regarding commutes, and decided to give it a shot. After speaking on the phone with my amazing future hospitalist director, I was completely sold and soon began working my 4 year stretch there (which I am now sadly leaving).
The big lesson I took from this experience is that you need to sometimes be creative and open minded when you move to a new city and are looking for a job as a doctor. It is actually pretty competitive to find jobs in New York City, I realized, since so many people want to live here. This also means that they can offer bad salaries and people will still take them. I figured that I had been through too much schooling and had sacrificed too much to take a bad job offer just because it was in New York City, so I decided to risk taking a job in a completely different state and figure things out (like transportation, logistics) as they happened, which I did. And it worked out for me!
One other final thing I want to mention is that networking is incredibly important when looking for a job in a new city. I didn’t know anyone in New York when I came here, but once I finally started working I saw that many new doctors in my hospital had ended up there because they knew someone there, or had been referred there by somebody else. And with all the people I have now met and gotten to know, I think I will be able to find a job anywhere in this part of the country now just because of the networking I have done in the past few years. I hope many of you reading this will be able to one day be in this position of applying for doctor jobs in a new American city. It’s so amazing and liberating once you finish your USMLE Step exams, rotations, and residency and can work freely as a doctor in America!
