[Medical students and their career choices. Preferred specialty, where and how to work]

This article presents selected results from a nationwide online survey in Germany asking medical students about their occupational perspectives and expectations: what kind of specialization are they inclined to, where do they want to work, and under what conditions? We sent an email to all the students at 34 of 36 faculties of medicine, asking them to partake in the survey. Through 9 July 2010, 12,518 students answered, which is 15.7% of all 79,929 students enrolled in medicine. One central result is that general medicine-compared to the current situation-will have significant problems in recruiting young medical professionals, if the preferences of the students do not change. In addition, we found spatial disparities: students consider Berlin and Hamburg, urban areas in Southern Germany and the Ruhr Area as attractive places to work, whereas economically underdeveloped rural areas in both Eastern and Western Germany are highly unattractive. So especially those regions will face the problem of recruiting a sufficient number of general practitioners. One strategy to solve this problem could be to recruit young adults for medical school from these rural locations, because there is also a clear tendency that students study close to their home and later also want to work there.