The Complete Guide to Becoming A Cardiologist

Chapter 1: What Does a Cardiologist Actually Do?

Let's strip away the white coat mystique and talk about what a cardiologist actually does on a random Tuesday. Not the movie version, not the pharmaceutical-ad version, but the dirty, fluorescent-lit, pager-still-going-off-at-11-PM version. The first thing you need to understand is that cardiology is not one job. It's a family of jobs with a shared foundation. The cardiologist who reads your echocardiogram might never step foot in an operating room, while the interventional cardiologist down the hall spends half of her week wrist-deep in arteries. Before you decide if this is the path for you, you need to know which version you're signing up for.

The core of the job: diagnosing and managing heart disease. At its simplest, a cardiologist is a specialist in the heart and blood vessels. You will see patients who have chest pain, shortness of breath, palpitations, leg swelling, or a history of heart attacks. Your job is to figure out exactly what's wrong and then decide whether that's a problem you can manage with medications and lifestyle changes, or whether it needs a procedure. You'll order tests, interpret them, prescribe drugs, and schedule follow-ups. But here's the part no one tells you in undergrad: a shocking amount of your day is paperwork. You will spend hours on electronic medical records (EMRs), writing patient notes, prior-authorizing expensive medications with insurance companies, and responding to messages from anxious patients on patient portals. Cardiology is a thinking job, but it's