<p>8 interviews in and I’m starting to realize how difficult all of this interviewing is. Just came back from NYC, dealt with hotel rooms smaller than a prison cell, going the wrong way on the subway system, probably spent $80 on taxi’s, flight delays coming in and leaving LaGuardia. </p>
<p>Cancelled 3 interviews today to reduce the number of interviews I’m doing to 21.</p>
<p>An obnoxious story from my son’s interviewing trail. My son goes to “middling” medical school and is interviewing at “prestigious” medical residency program and a doc asks him in the intervew: “So why did you go to “middling” medical school intead of a more prestigious medical school?” My son’s answer was that he got waitlisted at the more prestigious places, which was honest and very much my son, who is not a saleman. I suspect the obnoxious doc (my characterization) wanted some story about how he has turned himself into a superstar “despite” being at “middling” medical school.</p>
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<p>While the question could have been worded better, I would actually take that as a compliment as the interviewer likely implied that your son had an application equal to that of applicants typically seen from higher caliber medical schools. </p>
<p>I’m 15 interviews down and 8 to go. I’ve lucked out in that I haven’t had many strange or inappropriate interview questions.</p>
<p>^
agree, or maybe they’re trying to gauge how much your son puts weight into things like being close to family or being in a specific location, especially if such things would impact his ranking of the residency one way or the other.</p>
<p>I agree that they might be trying to judge if you’re really considering leaving the geographic area you’re currently in. I’ve gotten a lot of questions along the lines of “so, have you ever been to <insert city=”" here=""> before?" Or “what makes you interested in <insert program=”" here="">?" I don’t get those questions at programs that are close to either my home or my school. It’s assumed that I’ve got a reason for being interested in those programs, whereas at programs that are further away, I feel like they want to see a reason (other than program caliber) that I’ve applied there, and they want to see that I’ve put thought into it.</insert></insert></p>
<p>Agree with the statements on judging location/interest. I got that quite frequently on both rounds of interviews. For residency, I got a number of “you’re the first applicant from [my med school] that anyone can remember!” sort of statements. I guess I really did consider a lot of options. For fellowship, I think it was more trying to judge if I’d actually leave my home program since it has a very strong critical care fellowship as well (and I assume my letter of rec from our PICU medical director made it known that they wanted me to stay if they could get me to). It’s all a bit of gamesmanship. </p>
<p>On the other hand, it certainly could have been an obnoxious statement made by an obnoxious person. They are out there, and sometimes in startling numbers.</p>
<p>I can definitely see the location issue, but this had nothing to do with that. This school is in his home town and he wants to come back here to live.</p>
<p>Son is getting the location questions often as well. Two places actually asked him what they would have to do to get him to leave his home program. Most every place has been what I’d call a peer program or very close to it. The question wasn’t asked at the two places that are ranked a little higher.</p>
<p>His criteria has been quality of program, quality and quantity of placement into competitive fellowships and location. He’s finished nine interviews including just finishing a coast to coast and back again 8 day stretch with three interviews. He’s mentally and physically cooked right now so the brief holiday break is a nice respite.</p>
<p>He heads back out on 1/4 for another coast to coast trip with an interview in LA on the 5th and then onto the East coast for the 7th then back to Texas for an interview on the 9th.</p>
<p>He has seven more scheduled but is about to cut at least two. He told me yesterday that he’s really ready for it all to be over.</p>
<p>Every time he complains I remind him that it could be worse; he knows someone going for ortho that only has 3 interviews.</p>
<p>It’s all about perspective…</p>
<p>Regarding location: Son probably knows very little about residency yet as an MS1. Somehow he started to “warn” us that he might eventually stay on the east coast (NYC or Boston?) rather than heads back home for residency. I do not know from where he learned about something that makes him believe so. A bigger question is whether he really knows anything about this at this stage of his medical school career. LOL.</p>
<p>He once showed us his school’s match list; it seems most of them are on the east coast. The second most appear to be in California. I would think these were originally from California and they just go back.</p>
<p>I noticed there are 4 or 5 on diagnostic radiology and another 4 or 5 on radiology oncology. None of us know what the differences are between these two. There are about the same number on each of “ROAD.” Similarly for pathology. half a dozon on emergemncy medicine (DS somehow told us that is also a “life-style” specialty becvause there is no on-call.) Likely 2 on general surgery, and 2 on OB/GYN. Quite a few on IM or medicine (what is the difference between these two?).</p>
<p>I’m not sure what the difference between IM and medicine is. Could it have been Medicine-Pediatrics (Med-peds for short) instead? Or Family medicine? If it’s either of the latter two, then the difference is that these people receive training to treat children as well (and in family often, though not always, receive fairly significant ob/gyn training too).</p>
<p>Or if it’s medicine-preliminary, it means that they do one year of internal medicine and then start a residency in another field. Fields that require a prelim year include (but probably aren’t limited to, unless my memory is really good tonight) anesthesiology, neurology, radiology, dermatology, and PM&R.</p>
<p>Not everyone does a prelim year in medicine, they can do one in surgery as well (as far as I know), but I feel like fewer people prefer to do their prelim year in surgery. Also, some programs (neurology most notably) have started to offer four-year residencies but let the interns rotate through internal medicine the first year. The benefit to this is that applicants don’t have to match twice, which means they wouldn’t end up with the nightmare (in my opinion) of having to move somewhere to do their intern year and then move somewhere else after a year to complete their residency.</p>
<p>It is Medicine-Pediatrics. Thanks!
This is another one called transitional.</p>
<p>Transitional years are similar to prelim years.</p>
<p>As ginny mentioned, there are some fields that require a year of broad based training before focusing on a more specialized area of medicine. Surgical subspecialties like urology, ENT, neurosurgery, etc, require their interns to complete a general surgery year. Other fields like Neurology or PM&R will want their interns to complete internal medicine prelim years. Other fields like radiology ophtho or anesthesia don’t have a preference and will allow either a surgery or IM year (some programs may even allow a Peds year but this is much less common - as a pediatrician, I can promise you children are not just little adults). The goal is to develop basic patient management skills so that the remaining time is spent preparing you for your specialty. However, many general surgery and internal medicine programs treat their prelim residents poorly or at least less fairly than their categorical residents (the ones who are going to do a full residency in General Surgery or IM). Basically they take advantage of the fact that they have a large number of individuals they only have to put up with for a year and who frequently are just trying to survive so they can make it to their true desired specialty. So call schedules are shifted towards these people, they get placed on less desirable services with less than desirable attendings. Anything to make the lives of the categorical interns/residents better (It doesn’t happen everywhere obviously, but it happens enough that the stereotype is there).</p>
<p>Most coveted however are transitional year programs. These programs are more like the 3rd year of med school. Interns may rotate through several different fields (my friend who got one before moving on to an anesthesia residency spent months in Peds, Psych and IM), and generally the call schedule is much more benign. Transitional year programs are also far more likely to offer flexible rotation schedules - the soon to be anesthesia residents get to hang out with the staff anesthesiologists, the budding radiologists assist on Interventional Radiology cases, etc…because of these characteristics and the lack of negatives associated with Surgery/IM prelim years, transitional year programs are highly coveted. </p>
<p>Lastly, some of those specialties that require the prelim years (for some reason in my mind, ortho in particular stands out in this regard), create agreements with the departments at their medical center and craft prelim years that avoid the pitfalls of separated pre-lim years. The department gets to put together a breadth of experiences it feels are meaningful rather than just having their residents get scutted out or abused.</p>
<p>also mcat - </p>
<p>tell your son that there’s no reason he has to stay in one geographic location. School officials may encourage certain pipelines, and nearby programs are more likely to have had successful matches with applicants from his school, but that doesn’t mean he’s stuck merely following those who’ve come before him. Certainly no one will fault him for wanting to be closer to family, and even if that’s not a consideration, it’s rare to have a door closed simply because of where one attended medical school (unless the people who have come before him have screwed over a program before - that can follow applicants from one institution just as much as successful matches can help future students).</p>
<p>My son, who is applying for anesthesiology (still have no idea how to spell that), has found the preliminary year interview invitations were much harder to get than anesthesiology. Also, he didn’t get a single interview for transitional year programs. They are coveted, and you will be competeting against some of the most competitive candidates for limited spots. This will, he tells me, raise an interesting ranking issue. If he likes program X more than Y, will he still rate the 3 year program at X (which will require a preliminary year elsewhere) over the 4 year (called categorical?) program at Y?</p>
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<p>In general, I have not liked the people I met at my transition year interviews. Most of them only care about when they get to leave each day. I mean, we all went to med school. Even though we’re going into fields like optho or radiology, we should still like medicine just a little. I just think it’s wrong to be selecting programs because they give you a $50 parking voucher each month or because you get to leave at 1PM instead of 2PM (and yes, at some TY’s, you literally can leave at noon or 1PM). </p>
<p>Personally, I’m leaning towards academic or community medicine prelims. No doubt I’ll work harder but I’ll learn more medicine and feel like I’m actually making more of a difference. The old adage is that, during medical school, you want attendings to tell you you’re functioning at the level of an intern. During transition years, the interns are functioning at the level of third year medical students.</p>
<p>I think it’s a slight advantage to do the prelim year at the same institution you’re doing your main residency but medicine prelims are not hard to match at. As long as you can get 5-7 interviews, there’s little chance that you’re not going to match (in which case, you can easily find a spot during the scramble). I wouldn’t rank a less desirable 4 year program ahead of a better 3 year program simply because it has a built-in prelim year.</p>
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<p>That is the same feedback that I am getting from those applying this year and from other residents and attendings. Transitional years are very loosely structured in many hospitals. You are essentially covering the scud work needed (just like if you were a third medical student). After all, how much more can you really learn from doing two months rotations in different specialties all over again? If the Transitional program is being offered at a community or private hospital, you are definitely going to get much less “formal” teaching. </p>
<p>I feel that an Internal Medicine Preliminary year will be definitely more important. If you are going to go into Derm, Neurology, Rads, etc, rotating thru anesthesia, OBGYN, etc is not going to be very helpful during your actual residence. Having a good, solid medical internship seems the way to go.</p>
<p>Well, all this interviewing finally caught up with me. I overslept for an interview today. Big time.</p>
<p>I originally only had two interviews scheduled for this week. Then, I got sick on the week of my Step 2 clinical skills test (which is a 7 hour practical) and had to reschedule it for this week. Then got another late interview invite and the only date that worked for me was this week. So, this week became Step 2 CS + 3 interviews on 4 straight days. </p>
<p>My Step 2 CS test concluded on Tuesday at 10:30 PM so I couldn’t fly out to NYC for an interview until yesterday morning, the date of my interview. I had to get up at 2:30 AM to make the 6:00AM flight. Didn’t get back till midnight and then was to get up at 5:30 AM today to make today’s interview.</p>
<p>Instead, woke up at 10:30 AM. Must’ve turned off my alarm half-awake. It was embarrassing to have to call the PC to apologize for the no-show. I will be setting a double alarm for tomorrow’s interview.</p>
<p>On the bright side, I finished interview #21 yesterday. 3 more to go this month before I’m done. I’ve canceled 5 interviews this month alone. It’s hard to believe that my first interview was only back on November 7th. Ten weeks later, I’ve done 21 interviews with probably over 80 physicians. I’m just really really glad to get this over with and to get back to rotations.</p>
<p>Rank lists are due 2/22 so there is still plenty of time to mull over my list. My top 3 are pretty much set and I think I would be pretty happy to get into any of my top 8 radiology choices (out of a total of 16 rads interviews).</p>
<p>Good to hear the update. For my sons anesthesiology residency, he’s got two interviews to go, and the final stats will be:
<p>His big issues in ranking with be:
<p>Wow, NCG, that’s rough. I got sick with an awful URI during the course of my last 3 interviews for residency (that were on back-to-back-to-back days), sick enough that I skipped the last interview I had, but oversleeping is rough. It happens, but it sucks to miss that opportunity. For my fellowship interviews, I slept pretty poorly most nights before - worried about not being up on time - and I’ll wager you’ll have some of the worst sleep of your life the nights before your remaining interviews because of what happened (had a buddy in college who slept through his first ever college exam and spent the remaining 4 years pulling allnighters prior to exams because the experience scarred him so much that he just wasn’t going to sleep anyways the night before an exam). Luckily you have so few left. </p>
<p>3sons - that’s the tough part of the Match. My advice is for him to go with his gut and the match will work out the way it’s supposed to. Overthinking it increases the risk for disaster and certainly you don’t want to try to “game” the system because that never works. If he likes UofC better, then that should be ahead of Rush. As for the Chicago vs the world argument, that’s more difficult, and certainly location IS important as it matters so much for life outside of the hospital. Personally, my residency experience was phenomenal, I wouldn’t trade it for anything, and it (my residency program) is largely responsible for my successful fellowship match, I’ll readily admit that moving to a state where I didn’t know a single soul was far more difficult than I imagined and my life outside of medicine suffered because of it. That drove a significant portion of my fellowship search, and I ended up in a location where I have a ton of friends from college…There’s a lot to be said for having a life outside of medicine.</p>