Surgical Oncology????

[HEME-ONC]

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Can anyone tell me about surgical oncology. How to get there? Is it a residency within itself? What is the lifestyle like? what is the pay like in comparison to other surgical fields? How competitive is it? And what are some of the top programs?
Thanks
HEME-ONC

 

[maxheadroom]

Surg-Onc is a fellowship that you do after becoming BC/BE in GenSurg. (Gen Surg requiring at least 5 years) I think that Surg-Onc is a two year fellowship, but I could be mistaken. Best programs are Sloan-Kettering (NYC) & MD Anderson. SurgOnc is fairly competitive. Quite often, strong candidates will have a research background (a year or two in residency), especially for the best programs.

Good luck.

 

[surg]

Surgical oncology is a fellowship undertaken after the completion of general surgery training. The organizing group is the Society for Surgical Oncology (SSO) whose website can be found at www.surgonc.org
There is a list of all the participating centers on their site. The application process is centralized with a "match" although it is a little unclear as to how the match is done (it's not through any of the 2 major matching programs, NRMP or SF Match) so it's hard to say exactly how it works. It is considered to be very competitive and growing more so each year. There are only about 12 programs nationwide with perhaps 20-30 spots so pretty much any spot is a good one. MD Anderson and Sloan-Kettering are certainly the two best known however. Pay is of course what you make it, just as in any other surgical specialty. I would guess that hour for hour, the pay is not significantly different from other general surgeons. Any average would be skewed by the fact that a slightly higher percentage of surg. onc. people stay in academia at least in one form or another than general surgeons as a whole due to their interest in research protocols.