It was something I sort of knew coming in. My mom was an ER nurse, and my step-dad is a firefighter/paramedic, so I spent a lot of time around the emergency dep

It was something I sort of knew coming in. My mom was an ER nurse, and my step-dad is a firefighter/paramedic, so I spent a lot of time around the emergency department environment. There's a lot of things that could be better about the field, and you have to have a thick skin in terms of what others in medicine think about your field/colleagues/you (i.e. we are idiots), but if you're interested in up-tempo application of a very broad swath of medical practice, knowing the basics of procedural "greatest hits" from other specialties, interacting with every other specialty in the hospital, and taking care of the drunk/drug-addicted/mentally ill/chronically-bad-decision-making members of society when they decide to visit the hospital for reasons ranging from inexplicable to perfectly legitimate, it's a good field. That said, in third year when I did my clinical rotations, I went into every rotation thinking honestly that I could see myself doing it. I am and was interested in pretty much every field (which helps in EM). If you can force yourself to step back and realize how cool much of what we do in medicine is, from a scientific or technologic perspective, and how great the trust that others place in the field and its practitioners is, I think it makes it easier to learn and succeed as a student.