Advice regarding pathology "rotation"

[Kell P]

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So I emailed the lady who teaches pathology at my hospital telling her I am a keen student who wants to get some hands on experience in anatomical pathology. I got a reply that we can start next week. I was wondering if there are any "basic" knowledge I should have that will give a good first impression? It's not an official rotation it's just me organising stuff in my own time but it's mainly to get some hands on experience to see if I will like working in this field.

Kind Regards

 

[KeratinPearls]

So I emailed the lady who teaches pathology at my hospital telling her I am a keen student who wants to get some hands on experience in anatomical pathology. I got a reply that we can start next week. I was wondering if there are any "basic" knowledge I should have that will give a good first impression? It's not an official rotation it's just me organising stuff in my own time but it's mainly to get some hands on experience to see if I will like working in this field.

Kind Regards

This has been asked many times in the past. I would just review basic histology. Nothing is expected from you as a medical student. If you are interested in a path residency, I would just learn as much during the rotation...aka ask a lot of questions. Attend conferences and jump on any learning opportunity comes your way. This may be a chance to get a letter of rec.

 

[KCShaw]

Showing interest, actually showing up, being willing to help with some basic paperwork or running around (if they let you), and asking reasonable/modestly informed/relevant questions, will all go a long way towards endearing you to any pathologist interested in teaching. This is in stark contrast to many other specialties, where to stand out one must already know what they probably aren't going to teach you anyway.

Having some rudimentary understanding of histology will absolutely help, and the more you can self-orient without them having to stop every single time will mean they can teach more in depth -- but frankly I suspect the average student can hardly tell small bowel from large bowel from liver from left nut under the microscope, at least with real world pathology specimens. Some have a hard enough time with real-world gross specimens. That's not an indictment of med students per se by any means, it's just the way many medical schools "teach" these days -- less time for the real-world stuff since everything is about multi-choice basic science exams instead.

Actually, just understanding what an anatomic pathologist does and doesn't do puts you ahead of the curve.. not just for medical students, but for certain groups of attendings as well.

 

[Kell P]

Thank you for the responses so I will definitely try to brush up on histology and gross anatomy. I am glad I purposely spent a lot of time doing those back in pre-clinical years since I found them fascinating (then again I found many things fascinating).

Attend conferences and jump on any learning opportunity comes your way.

By conferences do you mean like MDTs or something else?

Showing interest, actually showing up, being willing to help with some basic paperwork or running around (if they let you), and asking reasonable/modestly informed/relevant questions, will all go a long way towards endearing you to any pathologist interested in teaching. This is in stark contrast to many other specialties, where to stand out one must already know what they probably aren't going to teach you anyway.

Well I will definitely show up since I am organising this myself in my own time. I was wondering are there specific things I can try and learn before hand that will make me look good other than the histology advice given earlier? Like knowing different things lik frozen sections, grossing, cytology etc. Or knowing common pathologies (whatever that means)?

 

[KCShaw]

Well, more is more.

Knowing what those things -mean- is a start. I don't think anyone will expect you to be able to read a slide and make a diagnosis -- and really, the med student textbooks often don't show you H&E pathology very consistently such that one could learn those things from those books. I.e., your resources are probably limited. Still, simple clinical-pathologic correlations are good to have in your pocket. Every pathology department gets a slightly different set of core specimens. Colon cancer is a good common and relatively easy one, renal and lung cancers are also fairly common but there are different flavors. GI biopsies/polyps are usually pretty common, and often one of the first things new PGY1's learn about (at least, we did). Those might be decent things to know a bit about just from Robbins or whatever med student path book yall use. If you're a real gun you can try to find a copy of one of the general surgical pathology books to read from, but I've never seen a medical student do that, certainly not before they even started anyway. Maybe some on a follow-up rotation once they were sure they wanted to do pathology. If your hospital happens to have a big surgical service in something else, maybe read up a bit on that. I wouldn't kill yourself because you could find out you're reading up the wrong tree once you start, but if you're looking for anything to grab hold of, those are probably worth thinking about.

 

[anon3]

I got honors by telling the course director I wanted to be a pathologist, talking with him as much as possible (I'd show up end of the day to chat with him for a few minutes to an hour on what I saw that day or some general pathology stuff while doing some asskissing.) End of rotation, if you have a project or presentation, do the best job possible. That's what I spent most my time on. My evaluation were all from the course director commenting on my interest level, my end-of-day chats (taking extra time, easy to work with, receptive) and what the compliments I got on my power point presentation from the other pathologists.

There's Wheater's textbooks on histology and pathology you could probably borrow from one of the pathologists if you want something to read on what's normal and what's abnormal, one system at a time (i'd say the most common encountered for a rotation in order are gastroenterology, female, thyroid, lungs) I don't think it really mattered for my rotation or most rotations in general (the work isn't bad but doesn't leave time for med student pimping/questions) but having some idea of what you're looking at makes it less likely you'll fall asleep while they're signing out.