Interventional Competitiveness

[medigull]

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Im a 3rd year whos kinda lost as far as picking a specialty. One thing I do know is that I love the heart and if I do IM it would be with the ultimate goal of doing cardiology. One downside to it is the issue of having to match multiple times.

Just how competitive is it to land an interventional fellowship after general cardiology?

Also is there more a demand for interventional guys or general invasive cardiologists?

 

[PikminOC]

Anything worth doing is worth fighting for. Keep jumping those hurdles to get to what you want. Medicine is a lifelong choice...

 

[medigull]

lol yes I understand but its more of a curiosity and also family life thing. Im currently engaged to someone who also has a career and we will be starting a family soon. Cardiology is way up there for me and while its probably not a deciding factor I think I would probably end up wanting to do interventional. (I like being able to make an instant difference in a patient)

The issue becomes how competitive is interventional and am I looking at having to up root and move across the country 4 times in 7 years (1 med school->residency 1 residency-> fellowship 1 fellow->interventional 1 int->real job) or is it a situation where most people kind of disperse into their respective interests and even if you dont stay at your home fellowship you should be able to find somewhere relatively close

 

[Myostatin]

Im a 3rd year whos kinda lost as far as picking a specialty. One thing I do know is that I love the heart and if I do IM it would be with the ultimate goal of doing cardiology. One downside to it is the issue of having to match multiple times.

Just how competitive is it to land an interventional fellowship after general cardiology?

Also is there more a demand for interventional guys or general invasive cardiologists?

The big bottleneck is general cardiology fellowship. Landing an interventional fellowship after completing general cardiology should be a non-issue. The demand for interventional is pretty good, but you should aim to develop skills other than coronary - either peripheral or structural. If you know going in that you're leaning interventional, choose a general fellowship program that has good interventional training, as you're highly likely to stay on to complete interventional at the same place.

 

[OptimusPrime]

As stated before the most competitive step is matching into general cardiology fellowship. I have friends that stayed at the same institution for residency,fellowship and interventional and later practice in same location (similar to your situation they were also starting a family and didn't care to move).

With that said aiming to repeat the above scenario will put a great deal of burden on you since narrowing your choices to one location places tremendous stress on you as an applicant to always be the best internal choice available for the spot (it is reasonable to assume you will have stiff internal competition).

If possible try to rank general fellowship programs with an interventional training program that is descent in size (~2-3 per year) to allow yourself the best chance to stay local. General fellowship is decided through an actual ERAS match for majority of programs that partake in the match. For interventional you start your application through ERAS (again some programs don't participate) but there is no match. Pretty much your cath lab director or department chair will call the interventional training director at the place you're interviewing (and usually they know each other well from prior training, conferences, etc). With interventional fellowship more than ever is who you know that goes a long way to secure you a spot (a bit of generalization, obviously have to be good on paper as well but you get the gist).

OP