community practice after only 4 year AP/CP

[trent05]

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Anyone out there who plans to go straight out into private practice after residency? Obviously a boarded fellowship would make someone more marketable, but without any fellowship would it be impossible to get a decent job somewhere? If the job market continues to improve I think we will see more and more people just doing the 4 years and getting a job. Why should I do a surg-path fellowship and get paid a small fraction of what I would make in community practice, when it seems the only way to get comfortable with being a private practice pathologist is real work experience. Any thoughts?

 

[QuietSylph]

Anyone out there who plans to go straight out into private practice after residency? Obviously a boarded fellowship would make someone more marketable, but without any fellowship would it be impossible to get a decent job somewhere? If the job market continues to improve I think we will see more and more people just doing the 4 years and getting a job. Why should I do a surg-path fellowship and get paid a small fraction of what I would make in community practice, when it seems the only way to get comfortable with being a private practice pathologist is real work experience. Any thoughts?

From talking with recent residency graduates and those 4th years looking for jobs now, I've heard that doing a surg path fellowship may be less important in the South (and perhaps the Midwest) as long as you have what's perceived to be "solid" surg path training in residency. In other regions of the country, it seems to be increasingly expected that you will do at least one fellowship - whether it be surg path or something like heme or derm.

When private pathology groups were polled recently about what the new graduates were most deficient in, a big complaint was inadequate surgical pathology knowledge. Historically, the biggest complaint had been lack of knowledge about lab administration and business affairs. (And I think that's still an issue, it's just that surg path is increasingly a concern too.)

So I guess I'd advise that you do a surg path fellowship if that's what you want to do in practice. As it is, some groups don't like hiring fresh graduates, and if the perception is that you don't know your stuff or need a lot of handholding, that will be a major turnoff.

 

[yaah]

It's hard to say - groups doing hiring expect to do some hand holding at first for new hires, but they don't want to do it for that long. A year of extra training will help you in your job (in regards to confidence, experience, etc), but whether it will actually help you improve your job prospects I don't know. This will be, after all, the first year where this is even an issue so it may be too early to judge it.