To answer some of your questions and put things in perspective...
1. After your three years of pediatric residency, you have a few choices, but they are a little more varied than what was described above:
a. Academic Practice: within an academic medical center, you can practice as a general pediatrician or a hospitalist (generally you will have varied responsibilities and will likely have significant teaching, research, and/or administrative responsibilities; in the near future, hospitalist jobs in larger centers may require additional fellowship training or a chief year as a prerequisite; there are also hospitalist jobs within different subspecialties at some centers where you will do most of the front line work but will answer to a subspecialty attending [for example, you will be the primary physician managing a group of heme onc inpatients, but will be supervised by a board certified oncologist, or you will be the pediatrician in an ER, but will have an ER attending as backup for complex traumas, etc]).
b. Private Practice: within a for-profit business, you can practice as a general pediatrician (in some cases, you will see outpatients AND manage your group's inpatients when they are hospitalized AND will manage your future patients while they are in the newborn nursery)
c. Chief Year: work in a highly administrative AND clinically heavy role within a residency program for one year before entering independent practice (though you will likely have some attending physician responsibilities during this year)
d. Fellowship: as mentioned above, this is additional training after residency ranging from 1-4 years, depending on the subspecialty; during this time, you will be paid only slightly better than a resident, but your call schedule and research requirements will vary vastly depending on the subspecialty
2. Moonlighting: These are extra shifts of general pediatric work that are generally NOT at your training institution and NOT related to your subspecialty training (i.e. hospitalist, ER shifts, transport, nursery, etc). They generally pay pretty well (ballpark $70-150/hr), but do not provide benefits. You will most likely NOT have time to moonlight during a cardiology fellowship. I did moonlighting only during my third year of cardiology fellowship and it was pretty rough.
3. Research: Most cardiology fellowships require more clinical time than the other subspecialties (18-24 months of clinical time with 12-18 months of research in cardiology programs, versus ~12-18 clinical months and 18-24 research months in many of the other peds subspecialties), however there is still a requirement by the ABP that all of the core pediatric fellowships require a research work product before being board eligible (this may change in the future, but not anytime soon). So, even if you hate research, you have to get some done during any of the peds fellowships. Also, you will learn to appreciate the research months as a bit of reprieve from the extremely busy clinical months.
4. Length of cardiology training: Nowadays, almost all academic pediatric cardiology jobs will require 4 years of fellowship training (3 years of peds cardiology and 1 year of "superfellowship" in the specialty of choice [echocardiography, electrophysiology, heart failure, interventional cardiology, etc] or 1-2 years for cardiac ICU or adult-congenital cardiology. However, there are still many private practice jobs that only require the 3 years of core fellowship training.
Hopefully this was helpful. I'm happy to answer any questions you have.
