Advice for an incoming intern interested in heme-onc?

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Seaunicorn

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I'm a newly matched (yeah!) intern with an interest in H/O who is currently trying to schedule out electives for my first year. I have 2 elective months available and obviously one of them is going to be H/O but what I'm trying to decide is if I should do an inpatient consult elective, an inpatient-outpatient elective, or a pure outpatient clinic elective.

The idea of doing a straight outpatient elective sounds tempting after all the inpatient floor months I'll have intern year... But I wasn't sure if there was any disadvantage to doing this.

Any advice?

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My very first rotation as an intern was H/O consults; which was great because of interesting service, ability to walk about and get a feel for the hospital, not having to place orders (although subsequently switching to the CCU the following month was a bit of an adjustment, to say the least).

Do you have an inpatient onc wards rotation? If so, I'd wait to schedule an outpatient elective until you do the inpatient side. Outpatient is obviously much more optimistic and enjoyable than wards, but I don't think I'd have appreciated my outpatient month as much if I didn't do wards before that.

My vote would be consults
 
My vote would be for you not to worry about H/O right now and focus on becoming a good intern. You have a **** ton of stuff to learn in the next year. The only thing you can do is to talk to people and identify a mentor or two who you can work with later in residency. Don't try to get involved in research projects that have deadlines in your internship. you will almost certainly fail to deliver.

Every year I get emails from a couple of enthusiastic interns in july and august asking to work in research projects. They always disappear and never get back to me afterwards.
 
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I'm a newly matched (yeah!) intern with an interest in H/O who is currently trying to schedule out electives for my first year. I have 2 elective months available and obviously one of them is going to be H/O but what I'm trying to decide is if I should do an inpatient consult elective, an inpatient-outpatient elective, or a pure outpatient clinic elective.

The idea of doing a straight outpatient elective sounds tempting after all the inpatient floor months I'll have intern year... But I wasn't sure if there was any disadvantage to doing this.

Any advice?

Outpatient onc is most representative of a heme/onc career. New tissue diagnoses or worse the thrombocytopenia and mass without tissue consults get old quickly on consults.
 
It really depends on what the rotations are like. If your program has an Onc/BMT wards rotation, you could do this...but it will largely suck and will be busier than your ICU months. Also, depending on how the attending rotation is structured, you may work with only 1 or 2 attendings. This could be good or bad from the perspective of future LORs.

If you have an inpatient consult service, that might not be too bad, again depending on how it's structured.

I would argue for outpatient Onc quite honestly. It represents the bulk of Hem/Onc practice (I have about 1 new hospital consult a week and about 10 new outpatients a week). It will be an "easier" rotation and will allow you to have more time for reading and interacting with attendings. It will also give you more variety in what you see (our residents will rotate with 4-7 different attendings over the course of the month, usually 3-6x with each one).
 
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It really depends on what the rotations are like. If your program has an Onc/BMT wards rotation, you could do this...but it will largely suck and will be busier than your ICU months. Also, depending on how the attending rotation is structured, you may work with only 1 or 2 attendings. This could be good or bad from the perspective of future LORs.

If you have an inpatient consult service, that might not be too bad, again depending on how it's structured.

I would argue for outpatient Onc quite honestly. It represents the bulk of Hem/Onc practice (I have about 1 new hospital consult a week and about 10 new outpatients a week). It will be an "easier" rotation and will allow you to have more time for reading and interacting with attendings. It will also give you more variety in what you see (our residents will rotate with 4-7 different attendings over the course of the month, usually 3-6x with each one).

That's quite the gig you have.
 
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