Clinical training

The Hematology/Oncology Fellowship provides opportunities for you to gain expertise in hematology and oncology, which includes mastering the clinical practice of benign hematology, hematologic and solid tumor malignancies, and blood and marrow transplantation.

On the hematology and oncology inpatient services, you are expected to serve in a junior faculty-type role, directly supervising and guiding medical residents on the team, together with the staff physician. These resident physicians are responsible for most direct patient care, such as note writing, orders and dismissal summaries, which frees your time for supervision, chemotherapy ordering, and teaching.

You also participate in hematology and oncology consultations on hospitalized patients. These experiences help you learn pragmatic and scholarly approaches to a wide array of inpatient diagnostic and therapeutic hematologic and oncologic issues. Your assignments include inpatient and outpatient bone marrow transplant (BMT) services.

During the outpatient rotations, you rotate through the subspecialty clinics, working directly with expert staff physicians.

Research

You will have 15 months of protected research time during our three-year fellowship. This practice has consistently allowed our fellows to succeed in publishing the results of their research. Approximately 65 peer-reviewed publications and 90 abstracts are published by our fellows each year. In addition, our fellows average over 40 oral or poster presentations of their work at national and international conferences annually.

Continuity clinic

Our continuity clinic is unique. You acquire a panel of patients from the clinical rotations to develop a diverse set of continuity patients, across all tumor groups and benign hematology. As a fellow, you are truly the Mayo Clinic physician for your continuity clinic patients, with staff physician guidance to ensure delivery of expert multidisciplinary care and enrollment into available clinical trials. This continuity experience is invaluable due to the ability to develop longitudinal relationships and manage patients throughout their illnesses.

Call frequency

You only take call during inpatient hospital service months, and rotate call with other fellows on service during those months. Mayo Clinic follows the recommendations of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

Moonlighting

You may moonlight with program director approval. Moonlighting should not interfere with the required learning and must not violate the work-hour rules of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education or visa regulations.

Awards

We work to match all fellows with a research mentor, which has allowed several Mayo fellows to receive prestigious national awards. For example, a few recent achievements include the ASCO Conquer Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award, American Society of Hematology Research Training Award for Fellows, Lymphoma Research Foundation's Lymphoma Clinical Research Mentoring Program, ECOG-ACRIN Paul Carbone, MD Fellowship Award, and the American Association for Cancer Research's Scholar-in-Training Award.

Teaching opportunities

You have the opportunity to teach Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine students, visiting students from other schools, and internal medicine residents through bedside instruction and formal didactic lectures.

Evaluation

To ensure that you acquire adequate knowledge and develop the appropriate technical skills to meet program expectations, your performance is monitored carefully during the Hematology/Oncology Fellowship. You are formally evaluated by supervising faculty members on a regular basis and meet with the program director to review these evaluations. In addition, you regularly evaluate the faculty to confirm that your educational needs are being met.

Career development and mentorship

The Hematology/Oncology Career Development Program is a personalized, tailored program to assist you in making mentorship connections and developing a career trajectory to meet your educational needs. Many staff hematologists and oncologists serve as mentors, and their various backgrounds offer a rich diversity of research and clinical expertise.

Early in the first year of fellowship, you meet the two faculty advisers in the Career Development Program. Each fellow creates a Career Development Plan and you are introduced to potential mentors, based on clinical and research interests. Throughout the fellowship, the faculty advisers and mentors provide you with comprehensive educational advice and personal support.

Additional resources

Through the Mayo Clinic Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCaTS), you have the opportunity for formal academic training, including workshops on how to write a paper and prepare a grant proposal. You can also take courses that lead to a certificate or master's degree in clinical research, fully funded by the fellowship.