research first year

[HQAMIGO]

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Greetings,

I will be starting my first year of rad onc residency in July. I am currently interested in pursuing an academic career and have been told that publication record is important for getting academic jobs. I was thinking of doing clinical research which generally takes less time than basic but even then its good to start early as IRBs, waiting for patient accrual etc. can taken lots of time. So, I thought it might be good to start hunting around for a project during first year, nothing too time consuming, maybe a retrospective analysis/ case series.

However, I have also been told that transition to rad onc residency is usually pretty rough first year as most of the general medicine we learned is not applicable. My questions is, how many people have done research as a first year rad onc resident and did they feel that their time was better spent in research or perhaps reading important studies and learning "the basics."

Thanks!

 

[Gfunk6]

Usually PGY-2's in my program would gear up for research about 5-6 months into residency. This is done mainly in response to the ASTRO abstract deadline which is around late March to early April.

 

[CyberKnife19]

I would agree with G-Funk, as PGY-2's in my program start research projects in November or December as a way to get a nice project together before the ASTRO abstract deadline in mid-March. However, I think something like this is highly program dependent based upon their emphasis on research and number of academic days per week/clinical volume. If you are at a place that doesn't have a strong emphasis on research and/or high clinical volume, you may not have the time to put together a nice project b/c you may feel overwhelmed by your clinical responsibilities.