How hard is fellowship?

[JinxADC&MD]

I'm only a first year resident but know I would like to do comprehensive (i.e. no fellowship). The problem is I would like to live in the big west coast cities like LA and SF to be closer to family and understand that fellowship may make my job prospects better. I would potentially consider doing an anterior segment or glaucoma fellowship but stomaching another year of training and call has been difficult (I'm at a program that is notorious for brutal call).

What is fellowship like? How is it different from residency? How tough in terms of lifestyle/hours/call is fellowship?

I would like a more realistic idea of what ophthalmology fellowships are like to make a more informed decision. Thanks!

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[Slide]

If you're doing anterior segment, it typically is nowhere is bad as call as a resident. Location dependent but there really aren't that many anterior segment issues a resident can't handle. If you're at an academic center for fellowship, it'll primarily revolve around globe coverage.

 

[Openglobetrotters]

Like residency but much more so in fellowship, the experience varies in fellowship. Some are more difficult others are coast. It also depends on your residency background

 

[AQ888]

Fellowship call in most cases is going to be much much better than primary call during residency. Most things will be taken care of by the junior/senior resident combo. You may have to assist with globes as a fellow, which depending on the degree of trauma can get annoying since these go overnight mostly. Some programs expect you to run the consult service as a fellow - but these programs are very few in number, you can easily avoid these programs.

 

[JinxADC&MD]

Like residency but much more so in fellowship, the experience varies in fellowship. Some are more difficult others are coast. It also depends on your residency background

Gotcha. Id assume the only way to find out what it's like is to ask the fellow directly?

 

[immunology89]

I would not do a glaucoma fellowship if I did not want to see glaucoma patients and do incisional glaucoma surgery throughout my career.

 

[JinxADC&MD]

I would not do a glaucoma fellowship if I did not want to see glaucoma patients and do incisional glaucoma surgery throughout my career.

Definitely. I will make sure that I am interested in the subspecialty before committing. Just wanted to know what the fellowship life was like

 

[DrZeke]

It’s extremely variable depending on the fellowship and the subspecialty. Don’t do fellowship unless interested in the topic. You will get asked to take care of patients in that subspecialty and will want to say yes a lot if building a practice in a competitive market. So make sure you like it.

Training for 1 year is gone in the blink of an eye. You won’t regret extra training.