 So my schedule as a cardiology fellow, let's break it down. Hey friends, welcome back to channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lux, I'm a board certified internal medicine physician and currently a first year going into second year cardiology fellow. Now over the past year, I've been sharing my life as a brand new cardiology fellow, my roles, responsibilities, and you guys have been really enjoying it. So today I thought I'd go ahead and just share with you my month to month schedule as both a first year cardiology fellow and what my schedule will look like on a month to month basis as a second year cardiology fellow. It's got to be really, really nice. Before we jump into my calendar, I know a lot of you guys are much earlier in your medical journey compared to where I am currently. So if you're thinking in med school, if you're applying to med school, or if you're just early in med school or residency and you want to make sure you get all of the tips that I wish somebody had given to me my first day, look at the description for all the free resources that we've had that we've created over the past seven to eight years. The two free resources I definitely recommend you check out include just the study strategy that I use to make med school a lot easier. And two, our med school success handbook, which is a full guide of tips and tricks that I'm updating on a weekly basis of things that I wish somebody had given to me on day one of med school. But without further ado, let's jump into my schedule. All right, so let's go ahead and dive into my schedule. It's actually the second time I'm recording this because I can't remember to turn on my mic on. So round two. So the first thing we're going to look at is my first year schedule as a cardiology fellow. This is kind of a broad overview screenshot of what my schedule looks like on a month to month basis. Each of these rotations are four weeks long. I've done a full kind of breakthrough video, at least for the first half of my fellowship on the details of each of these rotations. So if you're interested to check out our entire cardiology playlist, but let me just kind of do an overview of what this year has looked like and what the remaining months will as well. So I started my fellowship with a month of bootcamp. This is kind of like introduction to being a cardiologist, being a cardiology fellow. I actually do very much of this bootcamp because I actually had my daughter about two weeks into the start of fellowship, kind of new as coming. And so I did as much of the bootcamp as I could and the rest of the time I took as paternity leave. And then I came back in the middle of this kind of heart failure rotations, very consult heavy. And then the pattern typically from my first year was a month of consults on some kind of rotation, a month of imaging, a procedural heavy month, and then kind of rotates. So as you can see, I was on a month of echo and a month of cat in the cath lab, then back into consoles and another month of imaging, do nuclear stress tests, then another month kind of procedural heavy or more of our ICU rotations. And then cat consults, cat. And this is kind of where I am right now. I'm about to finish my last cat rotation of my first year of fellowship and then starting next week, I'm going to go ahead and do my second round of echo. As you guys will see when we switch over to my second year kind of tentative schedule, there'll be a lot of differences in terms of where I'm prioritizing my time in terms of imaging, consults or procedural heavy. You'll easily start to see the kind of career I want as a future cardiologist. Now as I'm making of this episode, I have about three kind of rotations left in my first year. So starting next week, like I said, I'll be on echo, then another month of electrophysiology, which is something I haven't done yet. And then another month of ICU to kind of round it out. Now before we get into my second year schedule, I wanted to talk about kind of difficulty of these various rotations, just in case you guys are interested which ones is kind of the hardest, which ones are the easier ones, which ones are more lifestyle friendly or a better schedule. Most of these rotations have me coming in at seven to eight o'clock in the morning. Most calf procedures will start around seven thirty to eight o'clock. Sometimes they're a little bit later. ICU's you're always there at seven o'clock in the morning and then consults. Usually you'll get in at eight or eight thirty to see the first round of patients. Most of those rotations I'd be done by four to five. ICU obviously is the one that varies just because if things hit the fan, then you are there later just because you're taking care of all these sick patients. But in regards to an overall difficulty, I would say that ICU is probably the most difficult just because you're managing the sickest patients. Cath lab for us happens to be also very difficult just because you're working from Monday into Friday. And because we do one call every single week depending on the rotation that you're on for Cath lab, it happens to be Friday into Saturday morning. So I do my own rotation for Friday. I stay overnight from Friday evening all the way to the next morning. And because that is the one day where the ICU fell out off, I'm also seeing all the ICU patients with my attending and making sure that everybody even want to stable all the notes are written before I go home at like 11 o'clock. And so that is a very traditional 28 hour shift and definitely the most time intensive. And so having three months of that where you basically have five and a half days straight of work, which are the last day of the week being a 28 hour call, it gets a little brutal. Thankfully I'm on my last 28 hour call for a Cath lab Friday going into Saturday for the rest of the year this weekend. In terms of easier rotations, nuclear medicines, definitely something that's relatively lifestyle friendly just because stress tests don't take very much time or repetition to learn, you kind of pick it up pretty fast and some days you have a lot of stress tests to read, other days not so much. And so because you are at a whim of how many volumes of images you have to read, if there's a light day, it's a light day for you. There's nothing else to do. Same thing for echo, you can have busy echo day, you can have a quiet echo day. And for our rotations, usually echo ends up being called Thursday into Friday. So you can imagine if you do your 28 hour shift Thursday night into Friday morning, then you have the rest of Friday, Saturday and Sunday off, so that's really nice which is why I'm looking forward to this next month. Now before we get back to the rest of the episode, let's quickly talk about today's sponsor which is Picmonic. If you're on your medical journey and you haven't had much luck finding it, all of them on a resource that can help you learn the material that you need for your classes, your rotations, as well as help you quiz and test to build that long-term retention, Picmonic may be exactly the resource you've been looking for. And one of the most unique aspects about Picmonic has to be their story-based videos which combine these fun, memorable and silly images to help you remember specific features of a disease or a treatment. And when I save videos, I mean tons of them with endless playlists that you can sort based on the class you're currently taking, the board exams you may be prepping for, even the board resource you're learning from such as first aid for step one or even the rotation that you want to honor. In addition, they have very simple and effective ways to quiz yourself such as their daily quiz feature which allows you to continue to stay sharp on your past topics that you've learned to make sure you achieve mastery plus so much more. So once again, if you're on your medical journey and you haven't had much luck finding that all-in-one resource that can help you learn and master medicine to make the entire journey a lot less stressful then Picmonic may be a great resource for you. So if you're interested in learning more there'll be a link down below in the description and our friends at Picmonic have also been nice enough to include an extra 15% off for audience members for those who view that want to give them a shot. So if you want more information or want to get started with Picmonic click that link down below in the description and of course thank you to Picmonic for being today's sponsor. But now let's go ahead and jump into my second year of schedule. Now I took a screenshot of all the fellow schedules at least for the first two years just to give you a mixture of visualization of how multiple fellows could schedule but obviously took their names away for confidentiality. I am going to be this middle one right here so this is the schedule that I overall focus on but you can start to see how every month there are major rotations where everyone or at least one fellow is on that rotation. So I see you will have somebody on that month for the rest of the year and some of our 30 years will cover those as well but this is my schedule and one thing hopefully you can quickly start seeing is there are a lot less calf months. For example these are the new first year fellows that are coming in next year. They all have three just like I did but next year I just have one which is awesome because I don't want to do interventional cardiology for the rest of my life it's not just the direction I'm planning on going in. On the flip side you can start to see how I have many months of green being echo and a few extra months of additional imaging being nuclear and CT. So one, two, three, four, five, six. Six of my next 12 months will be an imaging rotation of some sign and so that is because that's what I want to do with the rest of my life. I want to be a good general cardiologist that has a very good grasp on things like echoes and TEs and CTs and stress tests versus being somebody that's in the cath lab doing procedures. That's my personal preference. It's a nice part about fellowship is that you can definitely dictate your schedule after your first year after you kind of done all the foundational stuff. And so just going down the list I'm gonna start with another month of consults. Right before this as you guys remember I'll be finishing a month of ICU. Consults can be very busy especially when you're further into your fellowship because you tend to get placed at hospitals and rotations. I just need somebody that's a little bit more adept. So now that I've done a full year of cardiology fellowship or we'll have at this point and I've done two months of consults I will get placed at a busier hospital for the patients end up being a little bit sicker and you're supposed to be taking more ownership. Then I'll do another month of electrophysiology likely will be the last month of electrophysiology I'll do for the rest of my cardiology fellowship because that's also not a field I'm going into. I will do another month of ICU so maybe two months apart I'll go back into the unit. And then now I start a big stretch of imaging heavy time. So I'll be transitioning into something called advanced echo which means I'll be reading more with the imagers and attendings who are very imaging focused. That is kind of what they're doing. They are have additional levels of training and so I'm making sure that the people I'm reading with are the most adept just to get my numbers and exposure in as well as teaching. And then I'll be transitioning to a stress test CT month with some vacation thrown in there and then kind of repeating more or less those same rotations and one of them that I'm really excited for here is a prevention month. So one of the things I will wanna do in the future is have some focus on preventative cardiology which means that if somebody is at the risk of having heart disease maybe they have a family history of it or maybe they've already had a heart cardiac event themselves what type of things can they prevent or do to prevent future incidents of happening. I think that is going to be super key. That's a big reason to why I'm so into fitness myself doing things like marathons and working outs just because if I can take care of my own health I can be a good example and role model for my patients especially those who are at risk for heart disease. So I'm really, really looking forward to that month of that rotation as well as that extra vacation that's thrown in there. And then I'll be finishing my second year with some of those required rotations another month of consult, another month of ICU one month of stress exams or stress tests and then another month of echoes or structures. This means reading likely TEEs on patients who are going to get valve repairs, et cetera. I've been working closely with the cardiologists that deal with more structural cardiology versus somebody who just reads an echo that is ordered generally in the hospital. These are a little bit more specific so that'll be a very interesting month and you can definitely get a lot of hands-on exposure. And the reason I screenshotted a few more of my fellows is just so you can see the mixture when it looks like. So all of the first years will more or less have a schedule just like I did. Just again, depending on the month there will always be somebody that is on cat somebody that's on echo, et cetera. But as you can see, some of my colleagues will be doing things similar as well as not similar to me. So I have a colleague who is at least for the time being interested in more interventional things. So they have two months of cath or I just have one but also they're interested in things like electrophysiology. So compared to my one rotation they have one, two and three months on electrophysiology. Actually a fourth one is right there too. So you can see how our preferences differ. On the flip side, you can see how this fellow has kind of a mixture. They have same echoes and CTs but maybe they're interested in a little bit more global health so they're actually going to do an elective that our institution allows us to do in Kenya which would actually be really, really cool. So they already have that into their schedule and so it's time to go do that global health elective which is awesome. So that guys is a breakdown of my schedule both the first year fellow as well as what is coming up for me as a second year fellow. Hopefully you guys enjoyed that breakdown. And again, understand that if you're early in your journey and you want to benefit from all of the failures as well as the successes that I've had through my medical journey definitely check out those free resources that I mentioned earlier. And if you want the entire blueprint of A to Z of what to do and what not to do that hundreds of students have checked out for the past few years, go ahead and check out the Med School Blueprint which I'll link down below and just be able to see the results that students have gotten and I'll let those results talk to themselves if you're interested, that would be linked down below. And as always, if you enjoyed this video hit that like button really supports the channel. If you're listening to this as a podcast hit that like and subscribe on your favorite listening platform. And if you enjoy this video then make sure you check out this video right here as my day in the life as a cardiology fellow as well as this video right here on why I ultimately picked cardiology for any of you guys are interested. As always, thank you so much for being a part of my journey. Hopefully it was a little help to you guys on yours and I'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace.