Norcalguy's Residency Application Process

Pre-Med & Medical School Pre-Med Topics
141

<p>Not too much in the way of updates but just wanted to post the rough timeline for the application process:</p>

<p>Second half of third year (spring of M3 year): start working on personal statement and CV. All throughout third year, you should be asking for letters of recommendation.</p>

<p>July 1st: ERAS opens and you can start working on the application.</p>

<p>July-September: pester letter writers about getting their LOR’s in, finalize CV and personal statement, fill out application, decide on which programs to apply to</p>

<p>September 1st: First day you can actually submit the application. Most people advise submitting the ERAS application sometime in September (if you submit it in late October for example, programs will think you’re just tacking on some safety schools). You can submit the application without having all of your recommendations in. The lesser programs will review your application without the MSPE (Dean’s Letter) and even without all of your LOR’s.</p>

<p>November 1st: MSPE’s go out from med schools across the country. Most of the more competitive specialties and big name programs won’t give out interview invites without seeing your MSPE.</p>

<p>October, November, December, January: interview season</p>

<p>Mid-January: first day you can submit your rank list although most applicants wait until February to submit their rank list</p>

<p>February: residency programs and applicants submit rank list and the waiting begins</p>

<p>Mid-march: match week. On Monday, you find out if you’ve matched or not. Programs find out if they filled all their spots or not. This will be the first year of changes to the old scramble system. Instead of having your deans and mentors make phone calls for you if you don’t match, you will instead submit your ERAS application to programs that did not fill. The programs will review your application (quickly) and offer you a phone interview (quickly) if they are interested. After the phone interview, within a day or so, if you are accepted, you will receive an offer of acceptance with 2 hours to decide before the program moves on to the next applicant they interviewed. The goal is still to get you a residency spot by March 16 (match day). In essence, the entire application process is shortened to those 4 days. </p>

<p>March 16th: Match Day!</p>

<p>Step 2 is generally taken anytime between July and January depending on if the applicant wants the score to be included in the application.</p>

142

<p>OMG This is amazing! Thanks for posting</p>

143

<p>Thanks for the timeline Norcalguy. Will definately bookmark this for a few years to come.</p>

144

<p>

</p>

<p>What are the guidelines you’ve heard about for this one, NCG? I know a few M4s who are doing this (not taking Step II until February-March), but I recently spoke with the PD of the specialty I want to match into, and he pretty much categorically said it was a bad idea. So do you need a 260+ or something to be able to pull off not having a Step II score on your ERAS?</p>

145

<p>Kid just got home. A fella she knows of from HMS didn’t match last time in plastic surgery and is basically sitting out in a research year. She doesn’t know enough of the story to give me the detail I would like to have. Happened to a BCM grad I know the year before that and he did some sort of pre-lim year. </p>

<p>This still seems like the worst part of this hellish process to me. </p>

<p>And asked D if she had any idea and she still said no. </p>

<p>Her timeline will be different. She plans on doing a research year and YSM wants that done after MS3 so you’ll know supposedly your career choice.</p>

146

<p>It obviously depends on your score and the specialty you are applying to. If you get a 260+ (in any specialty), you probably don’t need to take Step 2 early. But, even for me applying to rads with a 240+ score, it’s +/- whether I take step 2 early (I elected not to). If I had scored in the 230’s or lower, I would’ve. For most specialties, I would say that 250 or above, you shouldn’t take Step 2 early. 230’s-240’s is the gray zone if you’re applying for a semi-competitive specialty.</p>

<p>I wouldn’t wait until February or March to take Step 2 though. That’s pretty late. Plus, UCSF and a small number of other residency programs are now requiring Step 2 scores in order for them to rank you. For UCSF, you don’t need a Step 2 score in by the time you apply but you do need one by the time rank lists are submitted (in Feb). </p>

<p>I’m taking Step 2 in October and withholding my score. That way if I do well, I can release my score and update my residency programs. If I totally tank Step 2, I can still hide my score and most programs wouldn’t care anyway. Most students do just fine and end up with a Step 2 score that’s on average a few points higher than their Step 1 score.</p>

147

<p>Obviously, plastics is pretty hard to match into. But, you don’t have to match into the integrative plastics route in order to become a plastic surgeon. You can go the gen surg route which is tougher and probably longer. A lot of the people who I knew were applying into plastics also applied to gen surg programs at the same time just in case.</p>

148

<p>Ah yes - I forgot that you can withhold your score. I’ll probably take July off for Step 2 and then do a few rotations in the specialty I want (both home and away).</p>

149

<p>I will say that this is the point that the specialties start diverging from each other in terms of how they approach the interview season. Because the fields it affects the most (IM and Peds), the presumption is that less competitive fields care less about the dean’s letter, but in actuality, it’s merely a numbers game.</p>

<p>Even the smallest peds or IM programs are going to be significantly larger than any other fields. There are lots of medicine and peds programs that are in the 13-15 categorical residents per year which is generally considered “mid-size”, which compared to other fields that are taking 2-5 residents per year is gigantic. Filling 13 spots (or 26 like my large peds program, or 45 like the peds programs at Texas Children’s or CHOP widely considered the top two children’s hospitals in the country), requires interviewing way more people and the only way to get them all through and evaluated is to start interviews early and often. So, because of that, IM and peds applicants will get interview invites starting the middle of September. Looking back through my emails, it looks like I had all 12 of my interviews set and scheduled by October 20th, although I did get a late invite in mid November from the University of Wisconsin but my schedule didn’t work out…</p>

<p>Also with the smaller fields, they are far less flexible with dates. I had multiple friends who literally had two offers to interview on the same day and were told by both programs that they could come on that day and that day only, so my friends had to pick. Peds interviews generally were 3-4 times a week from the Second week of November to the end of January. The attitudes of the programs were also very different. The competitive fields, interviews really were about showing yourself worthy to be offered a spot, peds was way more about being recruited to the program. My friend who couldn’t make it to his ortho interview because of weather was basically told “tough S***”. In a sense, the programs don’t have to worry, they know they’ll fill their spots.</p>

150

<p>^Which is why most of us, especially those applying to competitive fields, can’t wait to get this process over with. No matter how you slice and dice it, it is not a fun process and the residency programs really don’t go out of their way to make it any easier. I heard that top ortho programs used to schedule their interview dates on the same day intentionally so that the top applicants would have to pick which one they would go to.</p>

151

<p>Gonna chime in to say that I, too, have heard of ortho programs purposefully scheduling interviews on the same day in order to force applicants to make a choice early on in the interview season. </p>

<p>Attitudes definitely change depending on the competitiveness of the specialty. When I was putting together my application, I was told that I needed to submit on September 1, the first day ERAS was allowing applicants to submit, because some programs would use the date I submitted my application as a measure of how organized and interested I was in their program. Meanwhile, some of my classmates applying for specialties like peds or psych didn’t have their apps done until end of September or October.</p>

152

<p>Dang, now I’m really happy I’m not going into ortho or one of the ROAD specialties haha.</p>

153

<p>Less than a week till 9/1. Will be submitting exactly on that day. Just touching up the personal statement now. I’ve requested 3 LOR’s. 1 of them is in but I can submit my application without all of the LOR’s. </p>

<p>Been researching programs. There’s definitely a lot of difference between residency programs, in contrast to med schools. One program for example only takes 2 residents and has just 6 radiologists in the entire hospital. This means you might be taught neurorads from someone who is just a general radiologist and didn’t complete a fellowship in neuroradiology. My home program, in contrast, has around 10 neuroradiologists alone.</p>

<p>Applying to 10 or so transition year programs and 5 medicine prelim programs, all located either near home or in the city I’m currently in for med school. Haven’t decided on the number of radiology programs but will likely be 40-50.</p>

154

<p>NCG,<br>
How do schools feel about giving priority to their own med school graduates? I have heard that UPenn tends to favor their own graduates. Is this fairly common with all schools?</p>

<p>Also, how many audition rotations does one complete? And can you do more than 1 away rotation in same area of specialization?</p>

155

<p>“July 1st: ERAS opens and you can start working on the application.
July-September: pester letter writers about getting their LOR’s in, finalize CV and personal statement, fill out application, decide on which programs to apply to”</p>

<p>NGC, the July you refer to above is in the 4th year, right?</p>

156

<p>Most residency programs will give a modest advantage to its own med students. </p>

<p>You can absolutely do multiple away rotations. For some specialties like ortho, you practically have to do multiple aways. I wouldn’t do more than 2-3 though. I personally didn’t do any away rotations. If there is a program you absolutely want to match at, it’s worth it to do an away rotation there. </p>

<p>Well, July is typically when 3rd year transitions into 4th year so I don’t know if that’s technically your M3 or M4 year.</p>

157

<p>^At most places, between July 1-5 begins fourth year. July 1 is also when all PG1s begin.</p>

158

<p>Good stuff NCG…</p>

<p>What’s your goal for total number of interviews you’ll do, or what does the “Charting Outcomes in the Match” report say you need to rank to match in rads?</p>

<p>As far as a personal update on my fellowship match process - I’ve heard from all the programs I applied to. Only one rejection, from a program I had heard good things about but had concerns regarding how I would fit in with their research (super, super bench heavy with no clinical or translational projects that fellows had worked on). They emailed saying they didn’t feel I would make their program a priority and I had to say basically “yeah, you’re right”.
So as it stands, I have 8 interviews scheduled, 7 with travel/hotel booked, and the last one has a date picked, but I’m waiting on the travel to see if I really will want to do one last interview. It’s definitely a hassle to get everything squared away…I managed so far to only have one major mistake - I scheduled 2 flights on the same day, the problem being that I needed the second flight to actually be a week later - that only cost me another $175 to change the reservation. And unlike for residency where I was able to sort of bundle trips together and drive to close locations (like the week that I flew to Indianapolis then drove to Columbus OH, interviewed, then drove to Lexington KY, interviewed, then drove back to Indy, interviewed and flew home all on back to back to back days), my programs now are all so spread out that I have to fly everywhere. Doesn’t help living in an extremely poorly connected city. Still an exciting process though…first interview is in 10 days!</p>

159

<p>Thanks, NCG and eaDad. Your posts certainly help us understand this process. </p>

<p>I see that you are applying to 40-50 programs. That seems like a huge number. Is this common or necessary especially for RADs? And do you have a common application that you fill up for all these programs? Thanks!</p>

160

<p>Wow this residency stuff is complicated. Just spoke to my M4 son last night. He’s going into anesthesiology. Apparently there are direct programs where you do all four years at the same place, and contingent programs that admit you but you go elsewhere for a year to do the internal medicine year, and then do the 3 years of anesthesiology. So he applies to direct programs, contingent programs, and also has to apply to transitional year programs, which are one year internal medicine programs in case he gets matched with a contingent program. Yowsa.</p>