I certainly enjoyed my pathology rotation during residency. Having been through rad onc residency and tumor boards, I got to see how valuable the pathologist's role is in the process of diagnosing disease. I did not enjoy pathology at all in medical school (translation: "hated it"), because I saw it only as memorizing boring facts, but I discovered just how cool pathology is (really) and began to see it more like detective work and trying to solve a mystery.
For your goals during the rotation, you should concentrate on learning what's applicable to you being a radiation oncologist. That is, you should be able to understand the process of pathology -- from taking the tissue (biopsy, surgery) to grossing it and creating blocks to processing the slides and finally to the microscopic diagnosis, possibly with supporting immunos.
Probably the most useful thing is for you to spend a lot of time with the residents and PAs who do the grossing. It's valuable to see the tumor in its uncut state, to see what exactly is removed during operations, and how the pathologist puts the tumor into blocks and looks at margins, etc. This will help you better to understand pathology reports for some of the more involved operations -- e.g. what exactly is the parametrium and bladder margin in a radical hyst?
You shouldn't have the expectation of finishing the rotation and then being able to look at a slide and recognize the pathologic diagnosis. It's simply not possible to become an expert at that in one month.
Try to spend as much time seeing tumor specimens. You don't want to waste your day away looking at biopsies of nevi and hyperplastic polyps. Most pathologists will see a mix of tumors and nontumors, so it's wasteful to spend a day with one pathologist and sign out a stack of cases, because a lot will be rather boring. Instead, you might look at the OR schedule for the day, to see what interesting cases will be coming in, and then follow a cool case (e.g. colon cancer resection, breast biopsy, brain tumor, prostate biopsy, Whipple, etc.) from start to finish. See it get grossed. See the slides cut. Then sign out with the pathologist who makes the diagnosis. Jump around from attending to attending to see what cool stuff they have to sign out that day.
Also, if you haven't seen one previously, be sure to get to see an autopsy. It's an experience. During my rotation, I saw an autopsy that was actually performed on a Rad Onc patient who coded in the department and later died, so it was interesting to see the continuum. It's important, I think, being an oncologist, to know first hand what the autopsy process is like, since you'll likely be consulting with patients' families about this at some point in your career.
