When you look at it broadly, they’re very similar. Similar competitiveness for residency spots and for jobs. On paper there’s more AP residencies and more AP jobs, but there’s also more APs out in the world. There’s a similar boards pass rate nowadays. It does seem like there’s more of a push for advanced degrees along with an AP residency than in CP…you can certainly pursue masters or a PhD in CP and there are tenure track positions, but ‘clinical track’ academia positions are more and more common in CP. If you do diagnostics only the degrees don’t really matter past board certification.
The broad categories of the fields tend to be quite similar…for both CP and AP you can work in a diagnostic lab, you can be in academia and do a combo of diagnostics, teaching, and research, or you can work in pre-clinical drug safety/contract research organizations. There are a few other really niche things, but those are the general options. So work setting is going to be fairly similar. There seem to be more small state-run labs that have anatomics but don’t have clinical pathologists, but there are some that do. Pay is fairly similar as far as I can tell from seeing jobs posted. Academia will pay the least, CRO/drug safety stuff pays best, and diagnostics in the middle. As far as specialists go, we’re among lower paid specialties but the work life balance (at least for me in diagnostics) is superb and makes it worth it.
The tagged APs can chime in more about their day to day stuff, but clin path is going to be a lot more focused on immediate sample analysis from live patients. There’s no necropsy duty obviously. I work in diagnostics. Both AP and CP in the big commercial diagnostics is now almost exclusively digital pathology and working from home. Cyto slides get submitted to the lab, the lab scans them with a microscope camera thing, and images get beamed to me via internet. I get 45-50 cases every morning. I read them out (evaluate then dictate a report), then when I’ve done all those, I’m done and I can log out and walk away from the home office. I answer calls from vets during my working hours but it’s usually questions about samples I did. There’s not as much bloodwork analysis in commercial diagnostics for CP it’s mostly cytology and hematology. My lab expects us to work about 8 hours a day but if you’re efficient they don’t care if we work less as long as the work is done and of good quality. I average about 6 hours a day, sometimes less because I’m fast. CPs in academia are still going to be primarily doing sample evaluation but there’s more teaching and research components. I did way more bloodwork analysis in residency/academia than I do in diagnostics. For the commercial diagnostic APs, life will be very similar. Histo techs will prep the biopsy samples and then they’re given a daily stack of histo cases to read digitally just like I am. The idexx and antech APs really aren’t doing necropsies themselves, just looking at submitted tissues. In academia or in smaller labs like state d-labs APs are gonna be doing more of the actual necropsies and/or teaching students and residents to do that. At my residency location they were on necropsy duty like once a month, then had a week to write up the reports, then spent a week on surgical biopsy samples, then had a week for whatever else.
For me, the difference really comes down to where you want to be in the process. Clin path often doesn’t give a “definitive answer”, but we help guide the clinical decision making and determine next steps and our patients are almost all alive. AP is more likely to give you an ultimate answer. I feel like with CP we focus more on little cellular details (since cyto doesn’t have architecture) and AP is more of a Birds Eye view entire look at a larger sample. But, especially in commercial diagnostics, it’s really just you and some cells at a computer all day every day. There’s so much shared between the two fields, it really comes down to what kind of samples do you like best.
I’d recommend you spend some time just hanging out with the pathologists at your vet school while they’re reading cases, if that’s something they allow. It’ll give you a good idea of what we see and do on a daily basis.
