switching specialties.

[aye]

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hey guys. just a hypothetical question... lets say you settle for IM or family practice because that's all you can get into. you become a family doctor and thrive but then five years down the road you decide you want to be a surgeon. how do you go about switching specialties?? would you have to reapply to surgical residencies again?? if so... would the programs look at your med school GPA, step 1,2,3 scores that are 5+ years old??? 😱

 

[pagemmapants]

Beats me, but we've got at least two current profs that started out doing surgery (one got all the way to a CT fellowship) and then switched over to Path. Bizarre.

 

[DocOB]

Also, what if you do IM and start working for a while and making a normal IM salary and then you decide that you should have done that Card fellowship? How do you go from making about 150k a year to 50k a year on a fellowship! Ouch. Or would it be different somehow?

 

[AmoryBlaine]

Also, what if you do IM and start working for a while and making a normal IM salary and then you decide that you should have done that Card fellowship? How do you go from making about 150k a year to 50k a year on a fellowship! Ouch. Or would it be different somehow?

I know people that worked as an IM attending for one year before fellowship (mostly secondary to the fact that they didn't decide until late in their PGY-3 year that they wanted to do a fellowship).

One worked as a Hospitalist x 1 year. She said that it was very tough to cut back to a fellow's salary after a year with the good bucks. That said, she went into a pretty lucrative field so I'm sure she'll look back on it as a good decision.

 

[diosa428]

hey guys. just a hypothetical question... lets say you settle for IM or family practice because that's all you can get into. you become a family doctor and thrive but then five years down the road you decide you want to be a surgeon. how do you go about switching specialties?? would you have to reapply to surgical residencies again?? if so... would the programs look at your med school GPA, step 1,2,3 scores that are 5+ years old??? 😱

I think that if the specialty that you want to switch into is closely related to your field, you can sometimes do a "fellowship" that is shorter than a residency (maybe something like if you're in IM and you decide you want do Neurology). But if it's a switch such as IM to surgery, I'm pretty sure you'd have to do residency over. I have no idea how they'd evaluate your app, but you'd definitely need new LORs from doctors you work with. If you go on the general residency forum and do a search, I think this has been addressed (in better detail).

 

[Law2Doc]

Also, what if you do IM and start working for a while and making a normal IM salary and then you decide that you should have done that Card fellowship? How do you go from making about 150k a year to 50k a year on a fellowship! Ouch. Or would it be different somehow?

It's probably not all that different than the change in income a lot of nontrad career changers have gone through. If it's what you want, you can live with the change in budget. Hopefully you didn't obligate yourself to a huge mortgage or anything like that until you got more settled.

 

[Long Dong]

I few years back on auntminnie (the radology site) I remember reading about a neurosurgery attending for like 10 years who went back to do rads.

 

[menaniac]

A couple of years ago I went to have LASIK, and the surgeon who did the surgery had been a pediatrician for 5 years, until all the crying babies drove her crazy. She went back and did another 3 year residency in surgery, and was running a pretty big LASIK center 2 years after finishing her 2nd residency.