Physician leaving clinical practice for FDA..

[Anonymous]

I’m former FDA and my spouse is a physician. I know physicians who have gone to FDA and been very happy, usually because of the work life balance, which is much better and more regular than most medical specialties. As one former surgeon told me, there are never real emergencies in regulatory work, not the way they are in an operating room anyway.

There are many different roles for medical officers at FDA, so it’s hard to generalize. There are medical officers in high-level management and there are ones who are individual contributors and do review work.

Someone mentioned being a medical science liaison in the pharma or device industry, and that is certainly an option, but be aware that being a medical science liaison means you are liasing with hospitals and those hospitals might be all over the country. Meanwhile, at FDA, you’re lucky if you get to go to a conference every year. So you can expect a predictable schedule without much travel.

Is the work interesting? I don’t know. I think it depends what sort of role you land in and what you can tolerate. If you are a medical officer in a review division, that is definitely a desk job where you are reviewing lots of paperwork and writing memos. Your boss might well be an engineer a few years out of school. You will be respected, but people will call you by your first name. Many clinical people would not be happy. Some are. It’s a big change for sure.

I remember one medical officer quitting in a fury because our boss wanted to pull some sort of power play and would not allow him to sign up for annual leave around Christmas, and he wanted to buy plane tickets a few months in advance. So there’s that; you will probably end up working for someone who is not as qualified as you, but has power over you. You’ll be assigned an office based on some formula that is based on how long you have been working in the federal government.

It can be OK. Your mileage may vary.

[Anonymous]

Given that this thread is 11 years old, it is unlikely that OP is around, but I'd be interested to hear how things have gone.