DO student with red flags - path residency chances

[medthrowaway1171]

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Hey guys,

Long time member here but using a throwaway for obvious reasons. I'll keep it short:

- 4th year DO student returning from a year long leave of absence that was burnout related
- COMLEX I 500's
- COMLEX II PE fail and Step 2 CK fail (209) related to said burnout
- Plan on retaking both in 2 months and passing
- Trying to schedule path rotations to get relevant LOR's, but none so far

Assuming I do well on CK and apply broadly (no geographic restrictions) do I have a chance at matching?

 

[deleted314957]

You will get into a residency. There is no ( or very few) residency less selective than pathology. Everyone and their brother offers path residencies. Even lots of crappy little community hospitals which have nothing to recommend them other than, perhaps, location.
If you cannot get into path you cannot get into anything.

 

[Unty]

You will get into a residency. There is no ( or very few) residency less selective than pathology. Everyone and their brother offers path residencies. Even lots of crappy little community hospitals which have nothing to recommend them other than, perhaps, location.
If you cannot get into path you cannot get into anything.

Yup if you say you love pathology or show that you have som pathology background, despite lackluster scores, you will get into pathology.

I’ve seen a bunch of people on the interview trail who you would never see in a competitive field like dermatology. People who were a dermatologist in their country who interview in Path and say they want to do dermpath but can do Path. You could tell right away she wanted nothing to do with anything other than dermpath and that was it.

There are a bunch of type B folks in pathology who don’t show up to residency weeks at a time, who do t like to gross because they are lazy.

It’s not hard to get into Path. There are programs who need someone who is willing to Gross for them aka cheap labor. There are programs out there with very few surgicals per year. <10-15,000

 

[HeyDalaron]

I would highly recommend going into family medicine instead. The residency is shorter and your employment prospects will be better. Going into pathology with poor scores will only get you attention from the bad programs, and name matters in pathology, probably more than in any other field.

 

[Unty]

People that go into bad programs get jobs however.

 

[HeyDalaron]

People that go into bad programs get jobs however.

Bad program = bad job.
Good program = no guarantee of a good job.

 

[LADoc00]

If you have a ton of red flags dooming you to a garbage tier of pathology training, I MIGHT consider a patient facing career like internal med.

Lots of cool stuff you can do with IM now from cosmetics to longevity concierge type medicine.