I am planning on applying in family medicine in the 2015 Match, the national system that pairs medical school graduates with slots in residency-training programs. As I prepare my application, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about why my career choice seems so unimaginable to so many of my classmates. Why do students at elite medical schools think primary care is boring?

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Many of my classmates started medical school with the goal of becoming a primary-care doctor. But somewhere between orientation and Match Day, the high-pressure moment when med school seniors find out where they will be training, the idealism wears off.

At my medical school, 12 out of 162 students in this past year’s graduating class have started primary-care residency programs. Nationwide, about 12 percent of graduates in the 2014 Match entered residencies dedicated specifically to primary care (though graduates who do general internal medicine or pediatrics programs may still end up in primary care).

In the academic hospitals where American medical students complete most of their training, specialty care is the norm rather than the exception. Teams of specialist consultants visit hospitalized patients, asking lots of pointed questions about whatever organ they know best. We students follow along, as part of a whirlwind 12 months known as the “core clerkships.” If a patient has a problem that doesn’t fall within the bounds of whatever specialty we happen to be rotating through, it’s not our responsibility—our advice to the patient is to follow up with his primary-care doctor.

At my medical school, we spend 7 out of 48 weeks of our core clerkships in dedicated primary care settings. But more than half of doctors’ visits are made to primary-care offices, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. The majority of medical care is taking place in outpatient settings, away from the type of care centers where we students learn the basics.

The lack of exposure to primary care sets the stage for my medical school’s hyper-specialized Match list. The role models we work with every day are specialists, and we start to imagine our future careers looking like theirs. As a classmate who is also going into family medicine said, “We don’t get to see the primary-care rockstars.”

But there’s something deeper at play, a widespread and nagging perception that primary care doctors just aren’t as smart as their specialist counterparts. A 2013 essay in the Annals of Internal Medicine asked the question most of my colleagues are too polite to verbalize: If you’re smart enough to do well in medical school, why would you go into primary care?

It’s true that certain specialties, such as plastic surgery and ophthalmology, have few positions available in residency training programs, so competition for those spots becomes fierce. Average test scores and grade-point averages are higher for students who successfully match into those programs. Primary care programs have more positions available, so fewer students vie for each one.