Factors for which radiology residents choose fellowship.

PURPOSE: The objective of this study is to assess factors that influence radiology residents' decision to pursue fellowship. Historically a large majority of Diagnostic Radiology (DR) residents have pursued fellowship, but with changes in the job market and the Covid-19 pandemic, this study analyzes the current trends associated with radiology fellowship choice. MATERIALS AND METHODS: An anonymous 28-question survey was constructed based on literature review and pilot feedback from university radiology residents. The survey was distributed through APDR and to all program coordinators to be distributed to residents. Demographic information and questions related to fellowship choice were assessed. The survey was conducted through RedCap and consisted of multiple choice and sliding scale questions. RESULTS: 214 radiology residents responded, representing 4.6 % of US DR residents across 199 programs. The top fellowship choices included neuroradiology (20.5 %), musculoskeletal imaging (17.3 %), body imaging (16.8 %), and breast imaging (16.4 %). Most influential factors for fellowship selection were strong personal interest, enjoyable rotation, work hours, job security, and compensation. Least influential factors were research opportunities and specific group practice. CONCLUSION: The decision to pursue fellowship remains almost unanimous among US DR residents. Strong personal interest, enjoyable rotations, and favorable work hours were rated as the most important factors in the decision to pursue fellowship. Neuroradiology, musculoskeletal, and body imaging remained the most popular specialties, with a notable increase in interest in breast radiology compared to literature. To attract prospective fellows, residency and fellowship programs should emphasize aforementioned factors and offer more early exposure to subspecialties during residency.

Broadening the Understanding of Medical Students' Discussion of Radiology Online: A Social Listening Study of Reddit.

Reddit.com contains one of the largest online social forums for medical students, the 'r/medicalschool' subreddit. The platform provides an opportunity to share news and discuss a variety of topics including specialty choice and residency applications. In this study we analyze posts on the subreddit r/medicalschool with the aim of understanding how medical students perceive radiology as a career and what factors influence their decision to pursue radiology. Reddit posts to were collected from the r/medicalschool subreddit (2009-2022) and a randomized sample of the corpus was labeled to yield 2000 posts that discussed radiology as career and 1542 posts not discussing radiology. Sentiment analysis of the labeled corpus was conducted using the SiEBRT RoBERTa transformer sentiment pipeline, a machine trained English language text analyzer. Student's t-test was used to compare sentiment of posts discussing radiology to nonradiology posts by career keywords. Posts discussing radiology as a career had an overall positive sentiment but were lower than nonradiology posts' sentiment (p<.001). Key words associated with a positive sentiment score were "procedure", "lifestyle", "income", "fit", "personality", "anatomy", "tech", "physics", "research," and "match." Negative sentiment score included key words "AI", "burnout", "culture", "job market", "midlevel", "sue", "teleradiology." "Procedures" had the most positive sentiment score, while "AI" had the most negative score. Our study highlights aspects of radiology as a career that are discussed positively and negatively on Reddit. These posts are read by medical students around the world and may influence their choice of specialty.