Gifts for a New Doctor Who Spent Years Earning Two Letters | Bluegrass Gifts

Most Gifts for New Doctors Are Gear, and Gear Gets Replaced

Shopping for gifts for a new doctor usually starts in the wrong aisle. Somebody suggests a stethoscope, somebody else a nice pen, and an aunt finds a mug with a joke about bedside manner. None of it is wrong. It is just equipment, and equipment is the one thing a new doctor will pick out, wear out and replace on their own schedule.

The best gifts for a new doctor mark the title instead of adding more gear, because gear is personal and gets replaced. A carved name plate with Dr. in front of their name, or MD or DO after it, is the first thing that says out loud what they spent years becoming.

That is the whole case for our Personalized Desk Name Plate, a carved gift for a new doctor with the title on it. It carves their name in strong serif capitals over a second line you choose, a specialty or a degree, into a solid wood board sized for a desk, a shelf or the top of a monitor. Nobody upgrades it next year.

The usual gifts, said plainly:

• The good stethoscope. Useful, but people like to choose one by feel and by ear, and by graduation most have carried one for years.
• Scrubs and a white coat. Sized, colored and sometimes issued by the hospital, so a surprise set can miss on all three counts.
• A nice pen. Pens walk off in hospitals. Ask any nurse.
• A watch or a leather bag. Lovely, costly and a matter of taste, which is hard to get right as a surprise.
• Doctor joke mugs and socks. Fun for a week. The same joke usually arrives three more times from other relatives.

What none of those carries is the title itself. For years this person has been a student, the one who is not quite there yet. Then one spring day the two letters are theirs, and the family that cheered them through it has nothing on the shelf that says so.

The Right Gifts for a New Doctor Depend on the Milestone

A doctor's first years come in stages, and each has its own right gift. Here is the stretch from the last year of medical school to a first practice:

• Match Day, in March. Residency placements are announced, and the next few years suddenly have a city attached. A dinner out or something for the new town fits. Hold the bigger gift; graduation is close behind.
• Medical school graduation, in the spring. A new graduate is a doctor, MD or DO, on graduation day. This is the moment for the name plate, because it is the first day the Dr. is true.
• The first day of residency, in the summer. Residency is the training after medical school, and the first weeks are long. Give practical help: a freezer full of meals, a weekend of errands handled. A plate given at graduation waits fine on a shelf at home.
• Finishing residency. Now they are an attending, a doctor who has finished residency, and often the one leading the team. A plate with the specialty on the second line suits the new job. If they will be in charge of residents for the first time, our piece on what separates a boss from a leader is worth tucking in with the card.
• Starting at a practice. A new desk and a door with their name near it. The 16-inch plate sits on the desk; the 24-inch holds a bookshelf or the wall behind it.
• Christmas in between. A resident may well be working the holiday. Give something that needs none of their free time to enjoy.

The gear lands best in the summer, when they need things, and the title lands best in the spring, when they have just earned it. It is easy to get that backwards and hand over a stethoscope at graduation.

◆ From the Workshop: Every order on these plates is read by a real person before anything meets the saw, and the spelling is checked against what you typed. We work that way because a misspelled name in wood cannot be fixed with a backspace; once the letters are carved into the board, they are there for good. That check matches the carve to your typing letter for letter, so whether the plate says Dr. or MD is a choice to settle before you type, which is what the cheat sheet below is for.

Sixteen Inches of Carved Wood That Moves From Residency to Practice

The plate suits a doctor who is going to move, and plenty of them will: medical school in one city, residency in another, maybe a fellowship, then a practice. The standard office name plate is a strip of plastic in a tray that stays with the office. A carved board goes in the box with the books and comes out on the next desk, and the letters cut into it read across a room at every stop.

The Small is 16 by 3.5 inches and $30.00, the desk size, made for a desk, a shelf or the top of a monitor. The Medium, 24 by 5.5 inches at $55, holds a bookshelf or the wall above a home desk, and the Large, 30 by 7.25 inches at $80, is for a study wall seen from the doorway. Every size has a sawtooth hanger installed and ships free in the U.S. Buying for two classmates, or one plate for the office and one for home? Any two or more signs earn up to 20% off at checkout.

We carve each one on a CNC machine in our Kentucky shop, on one face of a solid board: pine for the stain finishes, poplar for the paint finishes. There are 20 hand-applied finishes, Ebony and Dark Walnut through Weathered Gray and White Paint, and the carved letters stay bare wood against the finish, never painted. Bare grain on a dark stain looks clean and settled, which suits a clinic better than anything cute.

You type both lines on the product page and watch them appear on the board before you order. The name is set in strong serif capitals for a reason: every design is checked stroke by stroke, and lines thinner than about a tenth of an inch carve shallow and sand away. That is why there is no hairline script on our signs. We are a small Kentucky shop with 5,000+ customer reviews across the whole store, and every word on this plate is yours.

When the Name Plate Is the Wrong Gift

We would rather you buy the right thing than our thing, so here is who should get something else.

• They asked for a specific tool. A new doctor who has named the exact stethoscope they want has done your homework for you. Buy that.
• They are not a doctor yet. A first- or second-year medical student is years from the title. Carving Dr. that early is tempting fate; wait for graduation.
• The new job is already making one. Some practices order matching plates for every office. A desk plate is still fine, but check first so yours is not the second name plate on the same desk.
• The new graduate is a nurse, not a doctor. Different job, different kind of tired. We wrote a separate piece on personalized nurse gifts for the end of a twelve-hour shift that fits them better than this one does.

One honest caution for everyone else: plenty of residents share a workroom and have no desk of their own for a while. That is no reason to skip the plate, but it changes where it lives first: a shelf in the home office or the top of the monitor they study at, until the real office comes along.

The Name-Format Cheat Sheet: Dr. or MD, Never Both

Get this right before you type, because the plate carves exactly the two lines you give it. These settle most of the arguments at the kitchen table.

• Prefix or degree, never both. Dr. Sarah Hayes, or Sarah Hayes, MD. Never Dr. Sarah Hayes, MD; the Dr. and the MD say the same thing twice.
• MD and DO are both physicians. MD is Doctor of Medicine. DO is Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, and DOs are fully licensed physicians. Use the letters on their diploma.
• A new graduate is already a doctor. The MD or DO is earned on graduation day. Residency is the training after it, so a first-year resident is Dr. Hayes in full.
• Attending comes later. An attending is a doctor who has finished residency. Leave that word off a plate for a new graduate or a resident.
• Put the specialty on the second line. Family Medicine, Pediatrics, Emergency Medicine. It reads cleanly under the name and stays true long after residency ends.
• Leave off the word Resident if you want it to last. Pediatrics Resident is accurate for a few years. Pediatrics alone is accurate for a career.
• Dentists are DDS or DMD. Same training; the school picks the letters. Use whichever is on their diploma.
• The other doctorates, briefly. Veterinarians are DVM, pharmacists with a doctorate are PharmD, and a nurse practitioner with a doctorate may be DNP. For any of them, the letters go after the name.
• Use the name they practice under. It is not always the name on the family Christmas card. Their hospital badge will tell you.

Every design in our personalized signs collection works the same way, with the lines typed in and shown on the board before you order, so you can set Dr. Sarah Hayes beside Sarah Hayes, MD and see which one looks right at sixteen inches before anything is carved.

Their grandmother has been calling them Doctor since the acceptance letter came, and now it is true. Order the Personalized Desk Name Plate with the title they earned, and the first thing on their desk with those two letters on it can come from you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What to get someone who just became a doctor?

Get them something that marks the new title rather than more equipment, because doctors like to choose their own tools by feel. A carved desk name plate with Dr. before their name, or MD or DO after it, puts the title in front of other people for the first time and moves with them from residency to practice. Ours is $30.00 for the 16-inch desk size and ships free in the U.S.

Do you write Dr. and MD together?

No. Use the title before the name or the degree after it, never both: Dr. Sarah Hayes, or Sarah Hayes, MD. Writing Dr. Sarah Hayes, MD says the same thing twice. The same rule holds for DO, the degree of a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, who is a fully licensed physician. On a desk name plate, the specialty reads cleanly on the line underneath.

What size desk name plate is right for a doctor's office?

The Small, 16 by 3.5 inches, is the desk size: it fits a desk, a shelf or the top of a monitor, and it costs $30.00. For the wall of a study or an office, the Medium at 24 by 5.5 inches ($55) or the Large at 30 by 7.25 inches ($80) reads from farther away, and every size has a sawtooth hanger installed. All three are carved into solid pine or poplar with the letters left bare wood, and all ship free in the U.S.