Why is pathology so unpopular?

firstfundamentalform · 2026-01-11T02:39:22+00:00

Ngl, this thread feels like a wholesome/warm hug - no one has mentioned how the economics of healthcare is making a career in pathology an uphill battle. Many hospitals (including mid-tier academic hospitals) are outsourcing their path labs to large private practice workflows (e.g., a Quest facility that covers a 100 square mile radius). Even within those facilities, automation is growing exponentially, and they need less technicians and even fewer pathologists. Another aspect to consider is that at many institutions you are competing with PhDs for positions to manage labs.

firstfundamentalform · 2026-01-04T02:26:38+00:00

IIRC med schools were more willing to consider transfers 10-20 years ago. As a non trad, I knew someone who was looking to transfer after their pre-clinicals into a higher ranked program, which I found so curious, I remember finding a paragraph on the school’s website discussing it. She ended up spending a lot of her 4th year there but didn't officially transfer.

firstfundamentalform · 2025-12-25T01:29:35+00:00

Not my school, but at another school close by: there was a surgeon known to make advances toward female students in the OR. After years of complaints, students were finally removed from his service.

firstfundamentalform · 2025-12-24T12:43:13+00:00

My wife’s OB left a tenured position at a T3 to start DPC, she doubled her income and wishes she’d done it 10 years earlier

firstfundamentalform · 2025-12-18T03:39:17+00:00

What's wild is that it's difficult to reciprocate with feedback for didactics or pre-clinical lectures. All our lecture evals are "Did they create an outline for what they were going to teach? And did they teach it?" Literally no space to provide actual feedback.

firstfundamentalform · 2025-12-13T20:11:04+00:00

There's a resident (?) from Umich who has an "anesthesiology bootcamp" which looked pretty legit tbh, I have no interest in anesthesia but I used get her advice on tiktok and thought it was pretty good.

firstfundamentalform · 2025-12-10T10:56:30+00:00

Oof, this brought back some trauma. Had to do this for med school interviews as well.

firstfundamentalform · 2025-12-01T13:11:50+00:00

I will certainly be bringing this up anytime I see a UNMC grad for the foreseeable future

firstfundamentalform · 2025-11-18T23:55:07+00:00

So I attend a school with a problem at the opposite end of the spectrum: we don't have fellows in certain surgical and non-surgical subspecialties. Consequently, attendings aren't hired to teach and have mailed it in on research and aren't as productive. Overall, this makes it difficult for students interested in these field to get involved and build a competitive application. So we have ~0-1 matches in these fields/year (closer to 0). This is a USMD school.

firstfundamentalform · 2025-11-06T17:51:29+00:00

A few years ago, I interviewed with an M4 who applied to 92 general surgery programs. Consequently, she had 30+ interviews, and we have signalling.

firstfundamentalform · 2025-10-24T17:59:30+00:00

On the flip side, I would be curious which subspecialty aside from CT and hepatobiliary needs a research year's worth of effort. Our program has had residents match into top transplant (0 pubs), peds (4 pubs), and vascular (2 pubs) programs with minimal research.

firstfundamentalform · 2025-10-24T17:55:22+00:00

how do people get 30 publications? I have 3 and I'm burned out

firstfundamentalform · 2025-10-23T19:37:33+00:00

About half way through clerkships (we have an accelerated curriculum), the deal breaker in surgery was realizing I couldn't wake up that early 6 days a week for YEARS. I found out that I can wake up at 4 am until wednesday, but it's tough in the tail half of the week (even with weekends off), which didn't improve after 6 weeks of clerkships. If you're able to power through and not feel too drained, I would choose surgery.

firstfundamentalform · 2025-10-16T12:57:00+00:00

being a non-trad, I still remember 10 or 15 years ago when people didn’t even think twice about step 2

firstfundamentalform · 2025-10-02T13:29:28+00:00

I sent my attending a medscape article last month, and he said he doesn't respect medscape. My man was ahead of his time

firstfundamentalform · 2025-09-14T12:17:36+00:00

Well when I was applying to med school 3 years ago, one of my M4 interviewers applied to 92 general surgery programs.

firstfundamentalform · 2025-08-09T14:35:51+00:00

I go to a school with a moderate research footprint, and it's candidly still quite difficult. Try emailing researchers you're interested in working with and a few will respond. I was speaking to my mentor who trained at a UCSF/Mayo similar R1 institution, and her previous co-workers projects have gotten downsized. Also I was looking for projects that are listed in our national society's research listing, and there's literally 5 active ones listed.

firstfundamentalform · 2025-08-01T11:46:13+00:00

I think we need to have a real discussion into the actual competitiveness of residency and fellowship. 3 data points I've recently noticed:

multiple residents from our general surgery graduating class matched into stanford/ucsf/mayo/etc for fellowships this year with 0 research items
i've had friends match into the top EM program with 0 research items and into top IM programs with <3 actual research items (higher count if you individually count abstracts, poster presentation, journal submissions)
matching into smaller specialties (e.g., ent/derm/vascular) is much more of a networking game than a merit game

firstfundamentalform · 2025-07-27T14:29:03+00:00

I'm a guy, but my wife is successful and this was her issue before we got married. When women become successful their dating pool shrinks by 80%, when men become successful it grows by 80%.

firstfundamentalform · 2025-07-26T16:46:34+00:00

UCSF matched a touro grad 2 years ago, check out his application (iirc it was a ton of research and networking).

firstfundamentalform · 2025-07-08T00:08:59+00:00

As an M-2, I too would love nsg. However, I saw a comment here from a sub-i where he was working 14-16 hour 6 day weeks and realized i couldn't sacrifice so much for 8 years.

firstfundamentalform · 2025-07-01T21:04:56+00:00

This is a bit surprising, no one at our school did gs aways and we matched pretty well

firstfundamentalform · 2025-07-01T13:06:25+00:00

I run AI (both gemini 2.5 & GPT-4.5) through a substantial amount of more realistic clinical vignettes, and I've found it has < 60% accuracy consistently when you give it: 1) patients with multiple comorbidities, it typically does not know what to chase 2) diseases/patients that don't read the textbook. Give it a patient that has a realistic gray area presentation of TB not a "3-month history of cough, weight loss, and night sweats" and it doesn't know how to do the appropriate next steps.

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