Hi all,
I’m a soon-to-be M4, at the end of the long road of MD/PhD, planning on applying Path this coming cycle.
TL;dr is I’m 95% sure Path is the right choice but I can’t shake the feeling I’m “missing” something and looking for encouragement.
I was far more undecided than I thought I would be during clerkships. I came into med school, went through PhD, and came back to clerkships with the strong notion that I’d do IM or Peds for Oncology. Cancer patients have always been my favorite — they still are — and as you can guess my research background is in cancer biology.
I did a month-long path elective pretty early on simply bc I knew a lot of MD PhDs went into Pathology and thought well there has to be something to that. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Doing primarily thinking work all day, discussing cases with colleagues, making tea and going for a walk every day, talking with clinicians, and the greatly relatively reduced EMR / paging / messaging / calling burden compared to other specialties made every day not even really feel like work. Of course I was doing much less than the residents, but they gave me my own cases to preview and trying to figure out things on my own at the microscope was satisfying.
Fast forward to the specialties I thought I was going to do. In Peds, I loved inpatient peds. Definitely my favorite patient facing rotation of medical school. I have exactly zero interest in general outpatient pediatrics, though and as you all know the job market and pay in academic pediatric oncology is…a tough compromise. In IM, generally miserable experience. I liked diagnosis and work up of challenging cases but like many have experienced felt the majority of cases were just diuresing water off the titanic and I could feel myself burning out after 12 weeks of IM (8 weeks of core and I actually also did the 4 weeks of SubI to truly rule it out). Adult oncology is not bad (did 2 weeks of it on my outpatient medicine rotation) but incredibly busy / high-volume and the administrative burden outside of clinic seems like it would drive me insane if I was a 100% clinical faculty. I also did an elective in radiation oncology and really enjoyed it, but the geographic restrictions of the job market and the lack of true autonomy in your practice during training until your very last year kind of turned me off to the specialty. Great specialty in a field that is desperately in need of some 21st century refurbishing to their training path, I think.
So I landed on Path, the specialty I missed on most other specialties. My one doubt is that honestly I’m pretty good with patients. And I enjoy the relationships with patients, interacting with patients is probably my favorite part of any patient facing rotation (the EMR / admin burden and other stuff I listed above drains me more than I thought it ever would). Did other people going into path feel that they were both good at and enjoyed patient care but don’t regret going for path? KO