PGY2 oncology VS cardiology for ACADEMIA?

[hopeful1994]

Hi all,

Hope you are having a nice weekend!

I am currently a PGY1 pharmacy practice resident, and because of my love for students and research, I am 90% sure I want to do academia as a long-term career.

However, I have strong interests in both oncology and cardiology. Considering both are equal, which specialty would you recommend if I want to be in academia later?

The reason I ask is that I noticed many pharmacy schools have faculty members who have done PGY2 cardiology, ambulatory care, internal medicine, etc. However, I have NOT seen many faculty members who have done PGY2 oncology. Typically, they have oncology pharmacy specialists come in from affiliated hospitals to teach, vs having a faculty member that is an oncology specialist.

I would love to hear any thoughts/insight regarding this topic. Thank you so much in advance!

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[rl123]

As per ACPE accreditation standards, PharmD programs are required to provide students with 4 core APPEs: community, hospital/health system, ambulatory, and general medicine. To my knowledge, there isn't as clearly outlined requirements for elective didactic or experiential elements of the curriculum as there are for required cores. Pick any pharmacy school- they probably have 2-3 electives as part of their APPE year, and these encompass community, managed care, compounding, nuclear, industry, and ALL other clinical sites. Oncology would for sure fall in as an "elective" APPE, so I imagine there just are less practice sites being devoted to it.

A cardiology residency-trained pharmacist could precept both ambulatory (HF clinic, anticoagulation clinic, CDTM medicine clinics) and inpatient (cardiac/cardiothoracic ICUs, telemetry floors). An oncology residency-trained pharmacist could also do both (ambulatory infusion center vs inpatient oncology ward). It just seems like theres more "areas to place" a cardiology vs oncology. Also, the pharmacists I know that have gone into oncology did so because they were passionate about specifically the oncology patient population- and so I feel like there might be a bit of selection bias in the sense that many would not want to step away from having most of their time spent in patient care, to devote time to on-campus and experiential teaching.

All that being said- I agree with you; from what I've seen, there are more hospital-funded specialist oncology positions, and more school-funded faculty cardiology positions (that have hospital/clinic practice sites). Oncology specialists are in incredible demand, and this has a lot to do with the limited number of oncology residencies in existence and # of BCOP credentialed pharmacists, vs cardiology, pharmacotherapy, internal medicine, and PGY1-only programs that lead to cardiology-centric positions.