CardioExchange Archive

CardioExchange, an NEJM practice community for medical professionals dedicated to improving cardiac patient care, was active from 2009 to 2015. CardioExchange fostered discussion between clinicians from across the globe.

March 18th, 2015

Networking Opportunities and Cardiology Bootcamp at ACC.15

Saurav Chatterjee is a Cardiology fellow blogging this week for CardioExchange in San Diego at this year’s annual ACC conference. For more of our ACC.15 coverage including late-breaking news and in depth analysis, stay tuned to our ACC.15 Headquarters.

As the annual scientific sessions draw to a close, a few of the other ‘small-but-engrossing sessions’ deserve mention.

First of all, a dedicated Fellows-in-Training (FIT) lounge served as a great venue for meeting people, networking, or just plain lounging while grabbing some snacks. The organizing committee deserves special kudos for setting this up. I don’t recall prior iterations of the ACC or other national meetings having a dedicated space for fellows and being successful simultaneously in helping them group together.

A great session of EKG review by the superb Dr. Podrid in the FIT lounge held a relatively modest audience enthralled for two sessions in the afternoons.

Informative networking and ‘meet-the-mentor’ sessions again at the FIT lounge deserve a definite word of acknowledgement.

Finally, as a budding interventional Fellow I was absolutely enthralled by the bootcamp sessions set up by the TCT-ACC-i2 faculty. These were dedicated sessions where some of the most renowned interventionists in the country imparted pearls of wisdom in a case-based format for an audience largely comprised of interventional fellows or young faculty. I hope the other national societies—as well as future ACC meetings—will retain similar flavor and improve on these.

Word of regret: while we as trainees keep hearing that academic medicine is losing attraction and many a devout follower, I personally feel that such bootcamp-like sessions—for grant writing and one-on-one interactions with mentors to provide tips on how to survive and hopefully thrive in academia as Fellows or early career physicians in a busy specialty like cardiology, and many of its sub-specialties—may be successful in retaining at least some of those giving up on pursuit of an academic career.

Categories: General


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