<p>Looks like you’ll get there, norcalguy. My son who has a decent record, but nothing special, got about 18 interview invitations and has turned down 5. His turn downs were based almost entirely on locations he was not really interested in.</p>
<p>Dean’s Letter comes out tomorrow. The final piece to complete our applications. Good luck everyone!</p>
<p>Took Step 2 today. Forgot what an annoyance the Steps were. Eight 1-hour blocks of 44 questions with an hour of break. Scores back in 3-4 weeks. Will send to my residency programs if I score 240 or above. Otherwise, won’t bother.</p>
<p>Just wait until you take CS for the biggest possible annoyance ever…</p>
<p>
WTH is CS? 
Jeebus. Is there a cheat sheet somewhere? I’m obviously gonna be out of the loop (since I don’t even know the acronyms) but I’d at least like to be able to root for my kid along the way. :(</p>
<p>Step 2 CK is a 8 hour multiple choice test with 350 questions roughly.</p>
<p>Step 2 CS is a 8 hour pass/fail practical exam that makes sure you can speak English. Unfortunately, the testing fee is $1400. And unfortunately, the test is only offered in 5 or so cities nationwide. So, the majority of med students have to fly somewhere just to take this test.</p>
<p>S took the CS a few months ago in Houston and the CK on Sunday-yes they offer the CK exam on Sunday! He’s very glad to have them in the rear view mirror.</p>
<p>On another note, he’s on his way for his first residency interview tomorrow.</p>
<p>Next Monday is the start of interview hell for me. I’m very jealous of my colleagues applying for peds or internal medicine who only have to do 6-7 interviews. So far, I have 17 interviews scheduled for November, December, and January and am hoping for ~22-25 total interviews. February can’t come fast enough.</p>
<p>For the record I did 11 peds interviews (and 12 peds interview dinners) and 7 fellowship interviews…not as easy as NCG claims because interviews are exhausting. Hopefully they are close together - going Chicago → Seattle-> DC in the course of 8 days was ridiculous…</p>
<p>I may be too paranoid here: Will the “talk” about cutting the funding for residency programs in Congress make the life of a resident (or a medical student who applies to the program) more miserable?</p>
<p>In the following, I use pediatric as an example because BRM likely knows more about this specialty:</p>
<p>[MD</a> News - Pediatric Residency Funding in Jeopardy](<a href=“http://www.mdnews.com/news/2011_09/pediatric-residency-funding-in-jeopardy]MD”>http://www.mdnews.com/news/2011_09/pediatric-residency-funding-in-jeopardy)</p>
<p>Not sure what happened to the second half of my message in post #229 - All interviews, no matter the number are tough. NCG, best of luck. I have no desire to ever have been in your situation with 20+ interviews. The travel is the worst part. </p>
<p>mcat-
Certainly there has been a lot of talk about the funding cuts. The specific pediatrics funding mentioned in that article has been renewed as far as I know. </p>
<p>The problem at the moment is that federal funding for graduate medical education is under the Center for Medicare/Medicaid Services (CMS) which is of course a popular target for budget cuts. I think what is most likely to happen is that GME funding will not go underfunded. Certainly if there are already concerns about doctor shortages, this won’t move us in the right direction. There’s a lot of factors in all of this, but really, I think there will need to be expansion of GME funding to keep up with the growth of medical schools, as well as the ACGME’s ongoing quest to limit resident work hours.</p>
<p>What will residency look like going forward? I think it’s possible that several fields will consider leaving the ACGME and coming up with different accrediting methods. Quite a few of the surgical fields were not happy with the new work hour rules that came out in July. I don’t know how that would affect their ability to “recruit”, as with all the draw towards lifestyle fields already I think few students would choose to enter fields with drastically different protections of their time. The alternative is that many fields will lengthen training times, pushing general surgery from 5 years to 6 or 7 (even before research years are included) or IM or peds from 3 to 4. None of this is particularly attractive especially considering how many people go on to do fellowship. It makes a long process even longer (Personally I’m born pretty late in the academic year, graduated UG in 4, didn’t take any time off and I’ll be just past 32 when I finally get my first “real” attending level paycheck - still young, but at some point people don’t want to be “old” and still in training).</p>
<p>I’ve heard of people positing the idea that perhaps in the future, residents will have to pay for the privilege of training - I highly doubt this. It would absolutely change the economics of going into medicine (not great to begin with), and of course those longer residencies would have even greater difficulty attracting graduating med students. </p>
<p>If the funding is decreased, then I think what will be seen first is that a lot of community programs will fold up shop. The large university/academic programs, will probably trim their numbers too, but what most people don’t know is that CMS actually does have an absolute cap on the number of housestaff positions it will fund at a hospital. Presently it’s somewhere in the 600’s. The overwhelming majority of academic medical centers have long since expanded past that limit and fund spots with money from other sources, though there are the rare exceptions that for whatever historical reason made the decision that they would not expand past the limit (My program is affiliated with an institution that doesn’t go over the cap - it apparently makes for interesting discussions when programs ask to expand their residency size). Part of how the federal funding gets cut will determine the response from medical centers - does the reduction happen - on a per trainee amount, or in the cap or some other way?</p>
<p>Just came back from interview #1. Exhausted. I think I’m going to cap my total number of interviews at 22 (15 radiology + 7 prelim). So far, I’m at 19 (13 radiology + 6 prelim). This is going to be a long season. I think this interview cost somewhere around $400 and it’s a 30 minute plane ride away. Ridiculous.</p>
<p>So what is your budget, ncg? $10-12K just for travel and travel related expenses?</p>
<p>I don’t have a budget. I have parents ;)</p>
<p>I try to save as much as possible (book flights early, use Southwest sales, etc.) but sometimes expense is just unavoidable. Unlike with med school interviews, residents don’t offer to house you for a night. You’re on your own. Luckily, 5-6 of my interviews are local (within the city), another 2-3 are where my parents live, and 2 residency programs booked hotels for me so not all interviews will cost $400. This particular residency program was situated 40 miles from the airport, in the suburbs. There was no public transportation so I had to take taxi (a taxi there and back for a total of 80 miles came out to $150).</p>
<p>Hmmm. lol Let me re-phrase. Do you have an estimated cost of your interview travel and expenses? And, if you don’t feel it is representative or don’t want to personalize it to yourself, and maybe more appropriate to my query, do you have an estimate of what a similarly situated applicant would be spending?</p>
<p>It really depends what you’re going into as well as where you’re looking to go. I’m going into internal medicine and looking to be within a (kind of large) geographic region. A number of my interviews are vaguely within driving distance, and I’ve had a lot of places offer to pay for my hotel or arrange a special rate or something like that.</p>
<p>It’s certainly not going to be an inexpensive winter for me, but it’s nothing like the horror stories I’ve heard of either. Supposedly some people take out an extra $7000-$10000 in loans, and (so far) I’m on track to spend waaaaaay less than that. Taking into account that some interviews will essentially only be the cost of gas and some interviews will require air fare, hotel, and taxi costs, I think that I’ll average somewhere around $150-$200/interview.</p>
<p>Just to add to what I said above: at this point it’s not the cost that’s bothering me, it’s the exhaustion.</p>
<p>As much as I can’t wait to be applying for residency, I’m not looking forward to hitting the interview trail again haha. Good luck to all of you in the middle of applying and interviewing!!</p>
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<p>It really depends on the specialty you’re applying to and how picky you are about location. Ideally, if you apply to peds or internal medicine or family med, you won’t have to do as many interviews, you can afford to limit your application to only programs in a geographic area, and programs are more likely to pay for your hotel costs. All of this means that you won’t be spending as much as other applicants. </p>
<p>Conversely, if you apply to derm or plastics, your costs are still manageable because it’s very hard to get interviews. We’re still just talking about 3-7 interviews were applicant, which is manageable.</p>
<p>Specialties like radiology and anesthesiology are the worst because a) you have to apply to both prelim programs as well as the main programs and b) they’re competitive enough that you have to do 13-15 interviews (including low-tier programs) but not so competitive that a decent candidate won’t get those 13-15 interviews. So, you end up having to do 20+ interviews in order to match (13 or so radiology interviews + the 7 or so prelim interviews). </p>
<p>Interview costs are pretty much what you expect: planet tickets and hotel costs comprise the majority of the costs.</p>
<p>If I had to guess, I would say that my interview season will probably cost ~$5000, saved by the fact that there is a huge regional bias when it comes to interview invites (you will be interviewing at a lot of places close to your med school or close to family).</p>
<p>Norcal’s numbers are similar to my son, who’s going into anesthesiology. He’ll do about 13 anesthesiology interviews (he’s turned down 3 or 4 once he hit that number) and he’s got about 4 prelimins, but will accept several more. Just to add to the nuttiness of the whole process, one school very high up on his list accecpted him for an interview in their anesthesiology program, but rejected him from their preliminary year program! I don’t know what this will all cost, but kudos to my son who found a hotel in Manhatten for about $150 per night (shared bathroom and the person in the other room he shared it with started taking a shower just when he woke up to take his).</p>