switching specialties.

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.

 

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.

 

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).

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.