10 Tips For Radiology Residents To Get The Most Out Of Residency

I have made my fair share of mistakes during residency. I was lucky to have wise mentors, people who taught us by example. Tips to help you make the most out of your residency:

1. Be the person who picks out the toughest and most complex cases in the department to report. If there is one thing you implement from this post, let it be this. You will get sufficient exposure to the regular bread and butter radiology cases. Given a choice between reporting an easy and difficult case, always choose the latter. It might be an MRI for a brain tumor, CT complex craniofacial trauma, CECT for a laryngeal malignancy, an HRCT thorax with 10 different things going on in the lungs, complex congenital heart disease CT, the dreaded ICU radiograph, an MRCP of a hepatobiliary malignancy, a complex gynaec ultrasound, a foot MRI of a complex pathology, etc. It will be difficult initially but it is absolutely worth it in the long run. You get a very deep sense of professional satisfaction from handling complex cases well, whether diagnostic or interventional.

2. Develop rapport with referring physicians and surgeons. Be friends with them. You will learn more from a 10 min talk over coffee / tea with a top physician / surgeon than you will by spending 2 hours with any radiology textbook. Get to know the things they want you to mention in the report. Take follow ups of your cases from them.

3. Be approachable. Be the radiologist who the physicians and surgeons know they can trust to give an opinion on the complex and emergency cases for which they come to the department to discuss. You will also learn a hell of a lot.

4. Learn to report radiographs. Ignore radiographs at your own peril, master the art of reporting them well.

5. Seek to master all organ systems, all modalities.

Unless you are a subspecialist working in a tertiary orthopaedic / neuro / gastro hospital, you need to be an excellent general radiologist. Read up and keep reporting all organ system cases. You owe it to your patients.

6. Respect your craft. Read, report, work hard, be on time. Good old fashioned stuff, never goes out of fashion.

7. Respect the machines. Learn to optimise ultrasound, MRI, CT protocols. Learn optimum patient positioning for radiographs.

8. Never stop reading and learning. Don't stop reading even after you finish residency. A senior consultant at one of my previous hospitals read 1 radiology article from a journal every single day. Done day in, day out for more than a decade leads to phenomenal compounding. He also embodied a lot of the tips mentioned here. No surprise he was the most sought after radiologist in the hospital whose opinion was considered the final word.

9. Go above and beyond the call of duty. Spend as much time in the department as you reasonably can and see as many cases as you can, read reports of seniors and consultants. Might not be possible for everyone and am not advocating stressing yourself out, that is a recipe for burnout. But every little bit goes a long way. I did this in Mumbai as an assistant professor when my wife would be on her cardiology residency on-call. The physicians and surgeons would know more often than not I would be available in the department in the evenings for a quick opinion on in-patient and emergency cases. Again, you learn a lot!

10. Always keep in mind the patient behind the image. What is an 'interesting' or 'beautiful' case for you is horrible for the patient.