I need advice particularly from a Radiologist... read inside for more?

Question

I am going into highschool as a senior this year. I just recently decided that I want to be a radiologist, subspecialty most likely pediatrics(still deciding). I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction as far as the track to become what I want to be. I have done research but haven't really gotten anything. If anyone has sources of information they would be greatly appreciated. My GPA is currently about 83. If you could advise me in a course of actions such as college, community college first, and so on thing like that, any help would be great thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Most radiologists are too busy to hang out on Yahoo! Answers (unless they're on call). But my sister's actually a pediatric radiologist. She took a bit of an unusual path to get there.

You should know that she got a dissection kit for Christmas when she was 12, and she loved it! In high school she took physiology, and got to dissect a pregnant cat. Curiously, I once asked her why she didn't become a veterinarian, since she loves cats so much more than people. "Are you kidding? I couldn't do surgery on a cat!" My sister has 20/15 vision--better than 20/20--and that helps her in her work.

After high school, she went to nurse's training, but discovered she didn't like nurse's work. She went into a Job Partnership Training Act program, and ended up working first for a trucking company, then for a nuclear plant. At the nuclear plant, they looked at her college transcript, and sent her to train to be a radiation technician. She got married, then got laid off from the plant.

While she was laid off, she started taking more math and science classes at the local community college. She had taken just about all they had to offer, and was wondering what to do next when her husband was killed in a car accident. She used the life insurance money to move away to college and earn a degree in chemical engineering. At the time, she was thinking she wanted to do biomedical engineering, but she discovered that she really hates research.

A more direct route to medical school would probably have involved her getting accepted to a four-year college with competitive admissions out of high school. You have to take lots of math and science classes, but nobody says you have to be a science major. I have friends who majored in math and religion who are not practicing OB/GYNs.

By the time she had graduated, she'd been accepted to medical school. Pretty much everybody takes the same courses in medical school. You spend the first two years in classrooms or the lab. Actually, many medical students hire professional note takers to attend lectures for them because they need to spend that time studying. The last two years of medical school are clinicals, where you spend your time out in the clinics, hospitals and mental institutions, rotating through different medical specialties and actually treating patients. I remember my sister mentioning ob/gyn, psychiatry, and surgery.

Her last year of medical school, my sister was trying to decide between psychiatry and radiology. An important consideration for her at the time was that she be able to wear expensive suits and not get blood on them. She noticed that when she did the psychiatry rotation, she didn't want to come home and watch Jerry Springer or other talk shows that expose the train wreck some people's lives have become. That had become part of her daily existence.

But radiologists make more money than psychiatrists, and she was accepted to a radiology residency by the time she graduated from medical school. What was better, in was in a medical center that had a trauma center, in a city known for partying and crazy people! As I recall that was a five year residency, and she was only making about $30,000 a year at that time. Towards the end of her residency, she took the Board exams and became a Board Certified radiologist.

There were several paths she could have taken at this time. She could have become an attending physician in a teaching hospital, supervising residents, like Dr. Cox does on Scrubs. She could have gone into private practice. She choose to put off making the big bucks for another year so that she could make even bigger bucks later on. She was accepted to a pediatric radiology fellowship at a Children's Hospital on the other side of the country. That was one year, and she made about $50,000 that year.

She liked that side of the country, so she signed on to a private practice out there, and began to make 12 times as much as I make as a public school teacher. What was noticably different about the private practice was that she was expected to read lots more films in the course of a day--X-Rays, MRIs, CTs, etc. She was also working with three different hospitals. At one point, she was selected as medical director at one of the hospitals, but she hated it.

Eventually, her residency program back on the other coast was about to fold. They asked her to be the pediatric radiologist in their program training radiologists, and she was able to join a private practice with a better deal for becoming a partner (tapping into the profits of the firm) at the same time. She accepted.