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One thing about being an ophthalmologist -- your services are needed everywhere. Consider Dr. Kevin Gregory-Evans. He went to medical school at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, England.

"I've worked in America... and now I'm working in Canada, and I've never had a problem, when I wanted to move, in finding a job somewhere," says Dr. Gregory-Evans. "So the career potential, from that perspective, is very good."

Dr. Gregory-Evans was a teenager when he decided to become a doctor. "When I was in high school I decided I wanted to have a career in science, but practical science -- something that actually did some good rather than just an intellectual pursuit," he says. "The application of science to me was medicine, basically. That's why I went into medicine."

While in medical school Dr. Gregory-Evans decided to specialize in ophthalmology.

"While I was there, I was interested to some extent in surgery, but I was also interested in medicine," he says. "And of all the specialties in medicine, ophthalmology struck me as, first of all, having a good balance of work involving medicine, but there's also quite a large surgical aspect to ophthalmology."

It wasn't just the balance between medicine and surgery that appealed to Dr. Gregory-Evans. It was also about the kind of difference he could make for people.

"Ophthalmology is a subject that doesn't save lives, but it improves the quality of life, in being able to bring back vision or stop people from going blind," he says. "I thought I would have a great impact on the quality of life of the people that I treated, so that's why I went into it."

One thing that aspiring doctors must consider is how much they want to interact with patients. They also must consider the work/life balance they hope to have.

"I didn't really want to spend all my time in an operating theater, which is what some specialties are, and that suits some people, but for me I wanted to be able to interact with people in clinics as well," says Dr. Gregory-Evans. "And I think that is true for a lot of ophthalmologists.

"Also, some people hear a lot in the press about doctors working ridiculously long hours and being awake all night and having to work under very stressful conditions," he says. "Ophthalmology... doesn't tend to be like that. It can, if you like, be very hectic and busy, but you can also tailor the work to be more of the sort of nine-to-five type job, so you can have a very successful and rewarding career but also have other interests as well."

There are certain qualities that Dr. Gregory-Evans says ophthalmologists should have.

"You have to be the sort of person who pays a lot of attention to detail," he says. "The eye is a small organ... so surgery is very intricate, and you have to have the skills that would be suitable for, say, somebody like a watchmaker. To be able to perform ophthalmological surgery, you have to [operate] on a very small scale. And for that you need to be very interested in the quality of the work that you do.

"And, also, you have to be a very careful type of person," says Dr. Gregory-Evans, "because the eye is very sensitive to its environment, and often in surgery, and in the medical side of the work, it's very easy to actually make things worse rather than better if you're not paying close attention to detail."

"You have to be good with eye-hand coordination because you're operating through a microscope," says Dr. James Reynolds. He's a pediatric ophthalmologist in Buffalo, NY.

"It's a very meticulous specialty," says Dr. Reynolds. "And surprisingly one that has a huge amount of material to master, as far as knowledge base. So you have to be a fairly meticulous personality, you have to like things sort of ordered."

Ophthalmologists use a lot of specialized equipment. And the technology they use changes rapidly. "You have to like to play around with equipment," says Dr. Reynolds. "You have to be able to troubleshoot your equipment, so you can't be put off by physics and chemistry of things, you can't be put off by picking up a screwdriver."

Dr. Reynolds was well into medical school by the time he knew what he wanted to specialize in. He says this is common for medical students.

"You're never really exposed to these small subspecialties until you get to medical school," says Dr. Reynolds. "I really didn't have any sense that I wanted to be an eye surgeon when I went to medical school, that's for sure. But as your medical school experience progresses, you begin to see all these areas."

What made him choose ophthalmology?

"One wonderful thing about ophthalmology is that it's this great combination of cognitive [thinking] and surgical specialties. The medicine people -- like internal medicine and family practice -- the sort of catchphrase for that whole grouping is 'cognitive specialties.' You know -- the people that 'think and don't cut.' Although I like to think that I think, too," Dr. Reynolds says with a laugh.

Besides the balance between medicine and surgery, Dr. Reynolds also likes that he gets to help his patients over the long term.

"Ophthalmology is unlike any other of the surgical subspecialties in that you keep these patients forever," he says. "[With] general surgeons... you go for two or three follow-ups, and they say, 'OK, we don't need to see you again.' But that's not true in ophthalmology.

"There are many patients who, you do surgery on them, but you continue to see them, you provide them with their glasses," says Dr. Reynolds. "So it's this great opportunity for longitudinal follow-up -- you get to follow these patients for years and years and years; you make a big difference in their lives. They're very happy, very appreciative.

"The surgery is terrific, but you have a big clinic population, too, that you follow along and you get to know them," says Dr. Reynolds. "So it really is this tremendous fusion of a cognitive specialty and a surgical specialty, and I don't think there's anything else like it out there, for that kind of combination." There's something else that sets ophthalmology apart from many areas of medicine -- you can make a big difference in the majority of cases.

"One of the great things about ophthalmology [that] I think most ophthalmologists would agree on, is that our patients are basically healthy patients, and they have things that we can cure, which is really nice," says Dr. Reynolds. "Certainly, if a kid has crossed eyes and I operate on him, it might cure that.

"So that ability to cure things in basically pretty healthy patients [appealed to me]," says Dr. Reynolds. "I did not particularly like spending my time in hospitals, and I was looking for specialties that were primarily an outpatient experience and [involved] short surgeries, and all our surgeries now are one-day surgeries. Nobody stays overnight, and I really like that. So there's no getting up at 7 o'clock and doing rounds before you come to your 8 o'clock clinic."

Dr. Denise Gallagher also didn't know what she wanted to specialize in when she started medical school. She's an ophthalmologist in Pittsburgh who specializes in the retina.

"I didn't really discover ophthalmology until I was halfway through medical school," says Dr. Gallagher. "Most medical school programs don't teach a lot about the eye, and... they give you some time to do some electives, and I picked ophthalmology just out of curiosity because I wanted to learn more about it. I ended up really liking it."

How did Dr. Gallagher come to specialize in the retina?

"One of my roommates, when I was in medical school, both of her parents were ophthalmologists, and actually one of them was a retina specialist," says Dr. Gallagher. "I thought, 'Wow, you can specialize in the retina!' I thought that was the weirdest thing, that you could specialize in such a tiny part of the eye. And, of course, now I'm a retina specialist, so go figure," she says, laughing.

Even though the retina is physically very small, it's extremely complex. Dr. Gallagher, like all ophthalmologists, is constantly reading to keep up with the latest developments.

"The treatments keep evolving, especially in the field I'm in... where there's been a lot of developments recently in the last couple years in terms of treatment of what were previously very hard conditions to treat, like macular degeneration and diabetes in the eye," says Dr. Gallagher.

"You really do have to keep on top of what's coming out in the medical journals, and usually I go to meetings a couple times a year, professional meetings, where they go through the newest research breakthroughs and things like that.

"So it's a very exciting field, and it's changing a lot, and I think that's part of what makes me interested in it, is because you sort of have to stay on top of things."

Staying on top of things involves a lot of reading. So start working on those reading skills early!

"You definitely need to have pretty good reading skills, reading comprehension -- being able to read things efficiently, almost like skimming in a way," she says. "Because through college and through medical school especially, you wind up having to read a lot of stuff, and you have to be able to go through the information quickly, because otherwise you'd get totally bogged down."

Getting through all that studying isn't easy. It takes a huge amount of determination to become an ophthalmologist or any other kind of doctor.

"It's a long process," says Dr. Gallagher. "If you want instant gratification, this may not be the best field, because some people don't want to be in school that long.

"It does take a number of years of training, and you have to jump through all these hurdles, but if you stay focused on the long-term goal of what you want to do, then it's a lot easier to do," Dr. Gallagher adds.

"There are all these stages. You can't really think of the whole process in one fell swoop. If you did that it would be very overwhelming.... You just do it step by step.... For someone who's easily discouraged this is probably not the best field for them. It takes a long time and you have to be dedicated to it and stick to it even when things get tough, to keep pushing through, so you have to be persistent and goal-oriented."