Oncology vs Pathology....Tiebreakers?

[oncorpath]

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4th year student making final residency match decisions.....I can imagine myself satisfied professionally and intellectually in either field. Please offer your thoughts on either field's future 5-6 years from now, in terms of job markets, flexibility, time off, reimbursement trends (tough to predict pre-election?), ability to schedule time to see my kids games/activities. The latter is possibly most important to me....I don't want to have to be an absentee father....a few years for residency/fellowship is mostly unavoidable and kids are young. Thanks for any input.....

 

[Gene_]

my 2c: I suggest to you that these are 2 very different fields and that you should do some soul searching and figure out which one suits you better. Do you want to see patients or not?

 

[yaah]

Yeah, they are pretty different fields. There are probably very few people who post here who have any real experience with heme/onc. And there are probably very few heme/onc people who have anything but peripheral experience with pathology (and thus, their impressions on what a pathologist does with their time is often warped). My impression of heme/onc is that they work longer hours than perhaps any other specialty, but my exposure has been to only a subset of them. Almost any branch of medicine will give you flexibility if you are willing to trade other parts of your job for it (compensation, prestige, whatever). Path is no exception. I'm sure heme-onc is no exception.

I wouldn't make this decision based on which field is going to give you more free time. Even that will vary from person to person and job to job.