Which is better, academics vs. private practice?
I don’t know that one is “better” than the other. What I can say is that I have been perpetually surprised by how little people who operate in one of these two worlds understand the other one. I would heartily recommend that anyone who feels he/she is “on the fence” take an academic job to see if it’s right for him/her. Private practice will always be there, and, even if one ultimately decides academics isn’t the right path, one inevitably continues learning about one’s field through conversations with colleagues, second opinions on difficult cases, and conferences. Those kinds of things are less available in private practice, and so only the extremely self-motivated radiologists continue to learn and grow as a physician. One of the other things that has really struck me about private practice is how many interesting cases I see — far, far more than I ever saw in academic medicine. In part, of course, that’s because of higher case volume of clinical practice, but it’s also due to the
