Surgical Oncology as a Career

[RocuROMANium]

What's it like being a surgical oncologist compared to other surgical fields? How about lifestyle? Are you on call frequently or not so much? Are most SO's in academia and, if so, are you involved with research? Finally, where do you think surgical oncology will be in 10 to 20 years?

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[Alakazam123]

I'm not a med student, but we had a surgical oncologist come into our class and talk about what he does. He was an academic, and not in private practice, but had an active lab that he was running. He told us that he worked close to about 70ish hours a week on almost a regular basis. However, he was married with two relatively young children. By his description, the more stressful part of his job was having to switch between being a clinician and being a researcher on a regular basis, more than anything. The man was in his mid 40s, but looked like he was in his 60s. Regardless, that's just a sample size of 1.