fellowships in malignant heme

[footballyus]

I had a question, how would people compare the merits of the heme/onc fellowship at Weil Cornell, Yale, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt?

From my understanding, Cornell, Yale, and Northwestern are all strong in malignant heme. How about their relative solid tumor strength? Does any of these programs place better into academic positions out of fellowship? Or do any have a reputation for fellow retention?

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[Happy Bird]

I had a question, how would people compare the merits of the heme/onc fellowship at Weil Cornell, Yale, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt?

From my understanding, Cornell, Yale, and Northwestern are all strong in malignant heme. How about their relative solid tumor strength? Does any of these programs place better into academic positions out of fellowship? Or do any have a reputation for fellow retention?

I think all those programs have very strong academic reputations and are good in malignant heme. I will say though that among that list, I was underimpressed with Yale compared to those other programs -- it is not that Yale is a bad program, but I don't think it compares to the others based on the information that I gathered during my interview day. I think unfavorable location and smaller size of the hospital affect their patient volumes too.

In NYC, Columbia and Sloan Kettering are also good for malignant heme. Sloan is considered an "oncology stronger" institution, but I was still extremely impressed with the program when I interviewed as a heme person.

 

[visari]

all are good places for solids and liquids. of course people are gonna tell you one way or the other and do some hair splitting but whatever. whether you're set on academics or private, none of those programs will hurt your chances. as for "fellow retention", do your homework and ask them when you go interview.

 

[RustBeltOnc]

Those programs are all great. You can't go wrong with any of them.

 

[Happy Bird]

I would also add that the most valuable information in your decision making process will be your personal impression and cumulative assessment on the interview day. Even though it is only a one day visit, you can actually gather a lot of useful information from your discussion with fellows and attendings as you try to determine if a particular program is a good fit for you. I found the interview days for fellowship to be so much more helpful than IM residency interviews. There were certain programs that I thought I was going to really like, for example, but underimpressed me on the interview day (ex- Yale, Mount Sinai, Emory) and certain programs wowed me (ex- Sloan Kettering, Vanderbilt, Columbia, NIH, etc.) During the interview trail, I really appreciated that heme onc fellows took a lot of time during lunch to talk to us and answer our many questions-- a lot of them gave us their email addresses too in case we had more later. I found these discussions with fellows to be incredibly helpful as I was making decisions about programs.

 

[carrigallen]

I think those are all four good places to train. I think the important factor is quality of the training program. Are you doing inpatient consult/service rotations, bone marrow biopsies, on-call all year, vs. do you have a lot of dedicated time for career development.

 

[Happy Bird]

Agree 100% with the post above. Programs that "impressed" me a lot seemed to invest a lot of time into the career development of their fellows rather than scutting them out with tons of call and inpatient service time during the third year of fellowship.