Your Specialty Choice Deserves More Than a Best Guess

Choosing a medical specialty is one of the most consequential decisions of your career, and most students make it under pressure, with limited information, and without anyone qualified to ask the harder questions. College Matters' Residency Consulting works with medical students to slow that process down: to test the reasoning behind a specialty choice, strengthen a residency application, and build a strategy for the Match.

This is not a service focused on polishing your CV so it looks competitive. It starts earlier than that: with why you're drawn to a specialty in the first place, what assumptions are shaping that pull, and whether the evidence from your own clinical experience actually supports it.

About Greg

Dr. Greg Makoul brings a background to residency advising that few consultants can offer: a career spent studying how physicians and patients actually communicate, and what that communication reveals about fit between a person and a specialty.

Greg spent 15 years on the full-time faculty at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, where he served as Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Communication + Medicine and helped lead major curriculum reform. He later spent six years as Chief Innovation Officer and Chief Academic Officer at Saint Francis Care, applying that academic grounding to real health system challenges. He has held faculty appointments at Yale School of Medicine and the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, and founded PatientWisdom, a platform built around understanding what matters most to patients as people, later acquired by NRC Health.

The communication assessment tools Greg developed are used in medical schools worldwide, and his research has earned him some of the field's highest honors, including the George Engel Award from the Academy on Communication in Healthcare. Few people have spent as much time thinking rigorously about the physician-patient relationship, across as many specialties and settings, as Greg has.

That vantage point is exactly what makes his approach to specialty selection different. Rather than starting with prestige, lifestyle, or competitiveness, Greg helps students examine what each specialty actually asks of a physician day to day: the kind of relationships it requires, the pace and style of communication it demands, and whether that reality matches what a student wants their working life to look like. It's a grounded, evidence-based way to test a specialty choice well before residency applications are due.