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I started thinking yesterday about life in general and the pathologist's place in it all....
My idea of the day: Performance jobs vs. management jobs.
Performance jobs are your surgical path and dermpaths, who work with high volume, high stress cases. Your ability is gauged every single day when you show up to work and start signing out. You cant have an off day. You cant take a month off straight or your eye starts to dull. The pros include you make alot of $$$ but at what cost??
Management job: The archetype is blood banking. You oversee a sizable employee base, typically report to no one but the hospital's medical director and are relatively free from peer review. You are NOT ability gauged everyday. On rare instances, you may need to soothe a clinician's concern or authorize a special blood product, but in essence you are the prince of a tiny medical fiefdom. Cons you make less money, have less interaction with medical staff.
In management you can leave for lunch at that downtown steakhouse, take off 3 hours early to pick up a sick kid or take a blocked vacation period without fear of skill decay (assuming you have coverage). In perfomance, those arent options. You cover frozens, field evaluations of CT needle adequacies and do stat evaluations. Youre physical presence is required in the hospital. Management can function by wireless.
This is how I would divide path:
Performance: Surgical path, dermpath and cyto
Management: Blood bank, chemistry and micro
Gray zone: Hemepath, Forensics
My conclusion is there is a break even point for deciding to go one way or the other. Say if I could land a CP only job and make 120K but can get a performance task for 350K, I would choose performance, but if the difference is less than 50K, management is the way to go. These numbers are arbitrary, but I think one could develop a rough model of where you focus your job searches and what type of lifestyle would best serve you.
My idea of the day: Performance jobs vs. management jobs.
Performance jobs are your surgical path and dermpaths, who work with high volume, high stress cases. Your ability is gauged every single day when you show up to work and start signing out. You cant have an off day. You cant take a month off straight or your eye starts to dull. The pros include you make alot of $$$ but at what cost??
Management job: The archetype is blood banking. You oversee a sizable employee base, typically report to no one but the hospital's medical director and are relatively free from peer review. You are NOT ability gauged everyday. On rare instances, you may need to soothe a clinician's concern or authorize a special blood product, but in essence you are the prince of a tiny medical fiefdom. Cons you make less money, have less interaction with medical staff.
In management you can leave for lunch at that downtown steakhouse, take off 3 hours early to pick up a sick kid or take a blocked vacation period without fear of skill decay (assuming you have coverage). In perfomance, those arent options. You cover frozens, field evaluations of CT needle adequacies and do stat evaluations. Youre physical presence is required in the hospital. Management can function by wireless.
This is how I would divide path:
Performance: Surgical path, dermpath and cyto
Management: Blood bank, chemistry and micro
Gray zone: Hemepath, Forensics
My conclusion is there is a break even point for deciding to go one way or the other. Say if I could land a CP only job and make 120K but can get a performance task for 350K, I would choose performance, but if the difference is less than 50K, management is the way to go. These numbers are arbitrary, but I think one could develop a rough model of where you focus your job searches and what type of lifestyle would best serve you.
