Our residents used to say: "I would never work here; the attendings are all miserable." I've heard that several times over the years. Even the ones interested in academics when they started quickly soured on academics after constantly hearing that their ideas were stupid and their work was never good enough. Years ago our residents almost never went into academics. Everyone went into private practice and never gave a second thought to academics. The attitude from most of those former residents is: "thank god I got out of that."
Now it's different. Residents come to senior faculty with concerns about the job market and are told it's their fault they're not competitive enough to find jobs. They get told to do more research for the faculty and network more. So the residents start looking for jobs as PGY-2 or PGY-3, build their social media presence, do some research to varying degrees of success, and still find nothing in their geographic areas of interest.
Some graduates find a rural position and then jump across jobs for years. Some go unemployed or locums for months, a year, or more before finding their first full-time job. Some come to our chair as PGY-5s begging for anything. They get treated exactly as expected too--busy private practice caseloads at satellites with little support, low end academic pay, and no opportunity for advancement either to full rad onc pay or real academic work. Most of these "clinical assistant professors" settle in for the long-haul given a large area non-compete and non-existent job market. We lose 1-2 faculty every year, and we're not even a big department. About half of these former faculty spend years outside of clinical rad onc, and some never return to clinical practice.
This is the future in radiation oncology. I don't believe it will ever get better. Here at our residency program there is no need for a "no SOAP pledge." I don't think our program signed it. It doesn't matter anyway. We will rank anyone who applies in the match, and we will fill unfilled spots outside the match entirely either by taking those who don't SOAP or internationals on an alternate board certification pathway. ARRO, and the rest of the "leaders" who are trying to build an academic career on our specialty's demise, don't count any of this because they are looking to kiss up to ASTRO leadership and secure their own academic jobs or promotions by writing fluffy little papers based on publicly available data. Why doesn't Tom Eichler come post on SDN? Oh I know, he's too chicken **** to talk to the rabble directly. He only wants to post a well curated proclamation from up on high and then read filtered replies on his tightly regulated senior leadership mouthpiece ASTRO forum that maybe he'll think about the job market someday when somehow it hurts him directly.
@TheWallnerus I don't trust numbers from the ARRO surveys at all. First, I never got a survey when I graduated years ago from ARRO, Terry Wall, or anyone else. Second, new grads are often lied to. I thought I was signing up for a main center academic job to treat one disease site. The first thing they did when I showed up was make a schedule that did not include the main center and tell me to go see whatever patient found their way to me. I covered 3-4 sites per week for years. I don't treat the disease site I thought I was being hired for and was trying to build a name in. I'm still here though. I'll be here forever. One hundred job applications later, and I still get to discuss a $300,000 full-time non-partnership track job once a year either in some other very high cost of living location I don't want to be in, or the middle of nowhere.
Picture of my chair attached
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