Residency applications! The light at the end of the tunnel, and the process that will chart the course for the next 3+ years of your life and your spouse’s medical career. No big deal, or anything! It is an incredibly exciting time, while also being quite unsettling. Here’s what to expect and how to make it as joyful of a process as possible.
Residency and The Match
Once you complete medical school, you must complete a residency to practice medicine. Learn more about the Match, residencies, different specialties, and life as a resident physician.
Popular Specialty Areas – and What Med Students Should Know About Them
For medical school students, perhaps one of the most difficult choices to be made in the course of their education is what area of medicine to specialize in—or whether to go into general practice. Part of this problem is the wide variety of specialties to choose from: the AMA lists around 200 medical specialties and sub-specialties.
Part of it also may be that there are a variety of factors–from expected income to the demand for certain specialties to the personalities and preferences of the individual medical student–to be taken into consideration before a decision can be made. Understanding all of these factors can take some time, but it can also make this very important decision a little easier.
The Undifferentiated Medical Student Podcast: Your Virtual Mentor for Choosing a Specialty
What is the Undifferentiated Medical Student podcast? Give us an intro.
TUMS is an interview-based podcast about choosing a medical specialty and planning a career in medicine. Many medical students feel lost when it comes to picking a medical specialty and planning their careers (myself included). There are many reasons for this (and some I personally faced):
-they are overwhelmed by the number of options
-they may feel they don’t understand enough medicine yet to start the discussion
-they don’t have a mentor
A Look at the Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program (SOAP)
Even the most confident and competent students feel anxiety as Match Week approaches: “What if … Read more
The Match: A Guide for the Big Day
It’s almost here! The day you’ve been waiting for! Before we talk about how to … Read more
5 Things in Residency That I Didn’t Expect to be Hard (But Were)
I knew residency was going to be hard. I had anticipated the long hours, weeks in a row without a two-day weekend (which, in an attempt to see the glass as half full, I have come to call vacations), and the mountain of new knowledge I would need to master. None of this came as a surprise and I was braced for them from the day I showed up for orientation. However, I’ve found that residency comes with a whole set of challenges I did not expect. If anyone had told me about them in med school, I guess I wasn’t really listening (or, more likely, was too preoccupied trying to figure out my patient’s acid/base situation by the time we rounded to take much notice). For each of us, these unexpected challenges in residency are likely to be a little different, stemming from our own strengths, weaknesses and pet peeves. Here are some of the difficulties I wasn’t expecting:
Residency Applicants Beware! Make Sure You Understand the Match Participation Agreement
With Match Week approaching, this is an exciting and hectic time. As you prepare for the next phase of your medical career, it is also important to understand legal issues involved in the Match®, administered by the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP)®. As part of the online enrollment process for the Match, residents accept the NRMP’s Match Participation Agreement (MPA). Residents cannot register for the Match unless they accept the MPA. The MPA is a binding contract exceeding 30 pages. Many residents never read the MPA during the online enrollment process. Others may skim the MPA, but not read the terms carefully. Lurking within the MPA, however, are numerous restrictions on what residents may do before, during, and after Match Week. Applicants who fail to comply with those restrictions in the MPA may commit a match violation, which could lead to substantial penalties and adverse consequences for your medical career. Therefore, it is essential to be aware of your obligations under the MPA and to assure your compliance with the MPA.
Advice for 4th Years: Creating Your Best Residency Application
The residency application process is winding down for the current cycle. As this is my second season reviewing applications to my residency program as a resident, I’ve across some insight that I wished I had as a fourth year medical student applying to residency. Being on the other side of the fence, I gained a deeper appreciation for the process and the care my program invested in selecting this year’s applicants. I will share some insight along with examples from current residents at various programs in the country. Here are five tips for 2017-2018 cycle applicants and beyond.
Residency Caps: What Medical Students Should Know
Updated December 26, 2021. The article was updated to correct minor grammatical errors and technical … Read more
Transitioning From Medical School to Residency
Congratulations! Graduating medical school and securing a spot in residency is a very exciting accomplishment. You … Read more
Why Med-Peds? A Current Resident’s Perspective
The transition from eager-to-learn-everything MS3 to self-assured MS4 with a clear residency goal comes much easier for some than others. I had planned on going into Family Medicine throughout the better part of medical school, but late in third year discovered the combined specialty Internal Medicine and Pediatrics (Med-Peds). How was I supposed to explain my interest in this four year program to my friends, mentors and, toughest yet, medicine department chair when I was just beginning to understand it myself? And then the inevitable follow-up question, why not just complete the three year Family Medicine (FM) residency program? FM training remains the perfect choice for many students looking to get broad-based, comprehensive training on how to care for people of all ages. The purpose of this article is to point out the subtle differences between these residency paths and give my top five reasons for why Med-Peds (MP) is a unique, exciting and attractive residency option for about 400 budding young doctors every year.
How To Choose A Medical Specialty: A Book Review
By Brent Schnipke
Central to the skillset of every physician is the differential diagnosis; this is the process by which new patients are evaluated to establish the most likely diagnosis. Similarly, the first clinical year of medical school is like a differential for each student, except instead of a medical diagnosis, students are seeking to determine which specialty they will choose. This column explores this differential: experiences from each rotation by a current third year student.
Note to reader: This month’s post is going to be a little different than previous articles, as I will be offering my book review of How to Choose a Medical Specialty. I’m currently on my Surgery clerkship, and will be writing about this clerkship in December’s post, so stay tuned!
In addition to providing snapshots of my clerkship experiences and a summary of each specialty rotation, this column is also about the process of choosing a medical specialty. After all, this is a major component of the third year of medical school for many students. Although learning the fundamentals of each specialty is essential, the exploration of different paths with the intention to eventually choose one is centrally important for third-year students. The first two years of medical school are generally pre-clinical (mostly classroom work), and applications for residency spots are submitted early in fourth year; therefore, third year is the main opportunity for students to explore fields that might be interesting to them, and to get exposure to many fields. This is the idea behind the title of this column, and one of my purposes in writing it has been to explore this dynamic and to share with other students some of my observations about each specialty, which may help some to make their own choice.
5 Things You Need to Know About Ranking Residencies for the Match
As you continue researching residency programs, applying, and interviewing with these programs, you’ll begin to learn more about what you’re looking for and which options exist. Pretty soon, you’ll need to turn your attention towards creating a rank order list (ROL) in order to eventually be matched with a program that you’ve interviewed with.
While this can be a daunting proposition, it’s imperative that you take it seriously and meticulously review every last detail.
Advice for Interns on Night Float
Earlier this year SDN member bob123451 was the lucky intern starting residency on night float covering multiple surgery services—vascular, general, bariatrics, colorectal, and a number of subspecialties—at a community hospital. Understandably nervous about jumping in with both feet, he reached out to the SDN community for advice. The following tips may be helpful, should you find yourself in the same boat.
Answering The Most Common Question in Medical Education
Central to the skillset of every physician is the differential diagnosis; this is the process by which new patients are evaluated to establish the most likely diagnosis. Similarly, the first clinical year of medical school is like a differential for each student, except instead of a medical diagnosis, students are seeking to determine which specialty they will choose. This column explores this differential: experiences from each rotation by a current third year student.
Doctors-in-training have heard this question thousands of times, beginning the moment they announced their intentions to pursue a career as a physician: The question, of course, is some variant of “What kind of doctor do you want to be?” Before I interviewed for medical school, I was told to answer noncommittally; it was suggested that, if I already knew what kind of doctor I planned to become, it would imply the clinical years weren’t important to me. I was told to leave it open-ended so as not to rule any specialty out too early. I see the value in that—looking back, how could I have possibly had a good idea, given my limited clinical exposure before medical school? Even for students that do have clinical experience, it’s easy to imagine they could change their minds and, regardless, should be open to learning from the clinical years. Similarly, we were told not to answer too definitively during third year either—the idea being that if we tell an attending what we want to do, and it isn’t the specialty we are currently working with, we will be permanently alienating ourselves from that profession.
Sleep Deprivation and Residents: Are We on the Right Track?
The tradition of long hours on the floor is an old one in American medical training. And criticism of this tradition is of long standing too. The controversy over the grueling residency schedules is not a new one, but neither is it one that has been successfully resolved. It can still spark off strong feelings in both the proponents and opponents of cutting back on the length of residency shifts and/or the time off between shifts for professionals engaged in this important stage in their medical education. What’s more, it is a topic which has pitted respected healthcare institutions such as the Harvard School for Public Health and the American Academy of Family Physicians against one another, so much so that this issue is not likely to be resolved anytime soon.
Choosing a Residency That’s Right for You
If you are in medical school, you have been making choices for a long time now, from what to major in as an undergraduate to what volunteer work during your gap year will give you the best chances at getting a coveted med school slot. But now that you are in medical school, one of the most important decisions still lies ahead: what kind of residency should you choose? This is an incredibly important choice that will shape the rest of your career. A good decision now will make it more likely that you will be satisfied with your professional life down the road.
The choice can be a difficult one. What things should you consider before you decide? Read on to find out more about the steps you should take in order to match to a residency that will leave you both personally and professionally satisfied.
Love and Happiness… And Medicine? Our Experience in the Couples Match
We were in the same class in medical school. It was your typical story. Boy meets girl, girl doesn’t like boy’s buzz cut, they waste a year, eventually end up as anatomy TAs working on the same dissection together, and fall in love. Standard. I knew that I was going to be a surgeon, he was thinking about ER. We moved in together. We talked about getting married. Then he went out for third year rotations and I started the Anatomy Fellowship at our school. He did Surgery mid-way through the year. To my concern, though not to my surprise, he loved it. He loved it the way I loved it. We talked seriously about what this would mean for us, both for our relationship and for our careers. We had always assumed that when the Match rolled around that we would participate in the Couples Match. Couples matching into Surgery seemed like a long shot, but we both knew we couldn’t be satisfied in another field, that we were surgeons at heart. So we decided we had to try.