Session 116 Residency director and pathologist Michelle Dolan, MD joins me to talk about how to get the most out of your residency and what it means to slap glass. Specialty Stories is part of Meded Media. If you haven’t yet, please do check out all our other podcasts geared towards helping premeds, medical students, and residents along their path to medicine. Listen to this podcast episode with the player above, or keep reading for the highlights and takeaway points. [01:45] Interest in Medicine Michelle initially didn't know what to do back in medical school until during her second-year pathology course. One of their lecturers encouraged them to do a pathology rotation. So she did and she loved it. She had to choose between Internal Medicine and Pathology. What drew her to Internal Medicine was hands-on patient care. But there were also some things that she didn't like. One of those five years could be a clinical intern year. So she decided to do an internship in internal medicine and she realized she really likes hospital care. This was before the advent of the hospitalist. She didn't like the clinical aspect but she liked the slower pace of pathology. [04:30] Traits That Lead to Being a Good Pathologist The ability to focus is an important trait to have in order to be a good pathologist. For instance, you need to be able to sit in one place for an extended period of time at the microscope or the computer screen. If you're going into anatomic physiology, a good chunk of your day is going to be spent "slapping glasses" where you just sit at the microscope and look at a lot of different cases. But not every field in Pathology is like that. One of the things that she likes about the field is how varied it is. You just have to be able to find that good fit for yourself. Because pathology is so varied, there are people who are very visual and love learning by seeing. There are also other parts where it's much more conceptual where you learn a lot by reading and thinking. There are other areas where you can learn by doing. To help you figure out which area to go into is to know yourself. [Related episode: The Pathologist as Medical Detective] [06:45] Pathology as a Varied Field There are not many trained pathologists that are cytogeneticists. One of the benefits of the Pathology residency is the exposure to every area within pathology. You can see what you like and you don't like, or what's a good fit and what isn't. Then you can plan your career from there. Pathology is a broad field in that they can look at a variety of patients from prenatal through geriatrics patients. They look at the entire lifespan. Moreover, pathologists get to know clinicians from a huge number of different fields. Michelle is also boarded in Molecular Pathology, which now goes hand in hand with Cytogenetics. There are so many tests now coming on board for molecular testing, most of which are housed in Pathology laboratories. Those connections among the different fields of medicine are only going to grow. [09:50] Increasing Exposure to Pathology All those being said, Pathology is not a required rotation in medical schools. This is a huge challenge because there's a striking decrease in the number of U.S. medical school graduates choosing Pathology. There's so much curriculum change in medical schools now that Pathology is getting shorted on some face time so it's difficult to engage students. To overcome this challenge, they try to be creative in coming up with ways to engage students. One of which is through a Pathology interest group. They also offer a Post-Sophomore Fellowship (PSF). It's an entire year spent between the first two basic science years and years 3 and 4. It's sort of a hiatus year where the PSF works like a Pathology resident. While a number of people who have done their PSF program have gone on into Pathology, there's also a good number of those who have gone into different paths.  It's a great year to learn your clinical medicine bec