<p>How do I apply for residency? Can I apply for any hospital like Baylor grapevine or does the med school we went to pick for us?</p>
<p>Don’t put too much thought into this until you’re actually in med school, but the basic process is this:</p>
<p>During med school, you decide which specialty you want to go into, and then look into all of the available residency programs (usually not based at a single hospital). Just like applying to med school, you create a list of residency programs you want to apply to and fill out an electronic application called ERAS (Electronic Residency Application Service, IIRC). Like med school, programs will invite you to interview, etc. For programs you really want to get into, it is a good idea to do an away rotation there so they know you already.</p>
<p>But then it gets to be a different process. You’ll rank the programs you want to go to in order from highest to lowest. The residency programs will also rank the applicants they want to take from higest to lowest (but they can’t tell the applicants where they are on the list). Then a computer will match you to a program based on both your list and theirs. Once matched, you have a contractual obligation to that program. </p>
<p>If you don’t match, you have to Scramble, which means you have to compete for any unfilled residency spots.</p>
<p>A few random things - you can apply for several different specialties at the same time if you want and just rank them however you’d like. There’s also a “couples match” where two medical students can indicate that they want to match at the same location because they are in a relationship. Not a guarantee, but it helps.</p>