BFF tells me her DS got his first rejection. Email said they had over 700 applicants for 5 spots. They were going to interview 55 and he wasn’t one of them. Now, he’s down to 69 possibilities! Crazy odds~
@mom2coIIegekids No idea for certain - although I can guess: small graduate programs, graduate school is probably the least important thing to the school (certainly behind undergraduate and medical school), not clear how much collaboration occurs between medical and graduate faculty, relatively weak medical school prior to 5 years ago, and lack of funding.
One key thing is that in order to apply for MSTP funding from the NIH, you basically have to already be an MSTP. You need MSTP caliber students and you need tuition waivers and stipends equivalent to the MSTP. I believe the thinking here is that, should the MSTP grant ever lapse (since the school has to reapply every 5 years and it’s not 100% guaranteed to be renewed), the program would not instantly collapse due to financial difficulty, stranding a slew of students.
My school’s program is technically only 50% funded by the NIH, and the school foots the other 50%. The program could be half the size and be 100% funded if the school wanted, but they have chosen long ago to pay to have the program be bigger. This is actually the typical scenario. I don’t think a single program - and certainly not any of the popular names - are 100% NIH funded. I believe it is estimated that it costs 2 million dollars per student (i.e. 1 from NIH, 1 from the school) to get us through the whole program. It’s quite an investment by all parties and is why, even after the intense self-selection of who applies, just over 90% of MSTP applicants are rejected from all MSTPs (in contrast to the 55-60% of MD applicants with no acceptance).
How to determine your medical specialty by flipping through your high school yearbook–
Lettered in 2 or more sports - orthopedist
Played, but didn’t letter - general surgeon
President of the AV club - radiology
Team captain of quiz bowl - internal medicine
Cheerleader or pep squad - dermatology
What’s a yearbook? - pathology
Homeless Outreach club - psychiatry
Most pics of you are with a teacher - any specialty that gets you into hospital administration
‘No photo available’ - emergency medicine
Glee club - pediatrics
/humor
In regard to publications, maybe it is important in some cases, but as I mentioned earlier, D. did not have a single publication (not her fault, somebody else was holding her manuscript) and she matched to her first choice in very selective specialty that is also very heavy in research. The person in her class who applied in the same specialty and had 7 publications and 5 away rotations, matched at about the same level as my D. and D. knows that this applicant did not match to her first choice. The difference between D’s cycle and her classmate cycle was that D. had only 12 specialty interviews (exceeding her goal of 10), while her classmate had 20 specialty interview invites and was able to go to 18 of them. However, the end result is absolutely the same and at the same location at competing places. As of now D. has one publication and another seems to be getting closer as journal (relatively prestigious) is asking for co-authors signatures and taking other formal procedural steps. As a first author, D. has this on her shoulders on top of prep. for Step 3 and absolutely horrendous schedule, but she sounds so satisfied when I talk to her, very big difference from before while at med. school. She likes to be in charge, and she said that few of her patients who actually follow her advice exactly, got much better and it is very satisfying. The frustration part is that there are many who do not and not much doc. can do in these cases. She said that unfortunately, she is getting used to this aspect also, cannot take it personally.
Since she has many electives, she is getting deeper knowledge of many specialties. However, her med. school impression of several that she disliked remain the same. So far, neurology and cardiology remain to be outside of her interest. IM remain to be very satisfying. I bet, her patients will miss her when she moves on to her specialty.
We all must be so proud of our med. students and MD’s. I am very much so, cannot stop to be in absolute awe in regard to what they are going thru and their accomplishments.
@WayOutWestMom, my personal favorite is http://www.med.uottawa.ca/sim/data/Images/Med_spec.jpg but the one I’ve seen people post the most is http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jOJE_J2A7mk/T_o0lgMEcwI/AAAAAAAABVI/xzBiPwmGnjA/s1600/specialty.png
Seen both of those before and keep a copy of the flowchart on my home laptop–just for reference sake.
My DS sent me a couple of variations:
http://doccartoon.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-to-choose-medical-specialty.html
and http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Af0bdmcSXis/SwbKEYJejCI/AAAAAAAAAPo/Zzczib4NXAY/s1600/Specialty.JPG
Residency match is always dependent on the goals of the program director. It’s impossible to make a blanket statement that there’s no bias one way or the other, because there can always be that one PD out there who really cares where students are from, but across all the specialties and all the programs, there’s no discernible pattern.
Most students will have a better chance of matching at their home institution, so long as they’ve done a good job on their clinical rotations in that specialty. Certainly I’ve seen students get blackballed early because they pissed their residents off so much while students.
Some medical schools have missions from their state legislatures to produce physicians that will stick around and provide care in communities in the future. That ideal may transmit to residency program directors, most typically in fields like Family Med, Pediatrics, EM, Internal Med and OB/Gyn so they may choose residents who express an interest in staying nearby in their post training career. It’s no guarantee, but it’s logical that someone with ties to the area is more likely to stick around than someone with none. For example in my residency class, it was about 50/50 students from the home institution and those of us from other med schools. For those of us who went on to fellowship, every single one of us who was from elsewhere went to other institutions for our next step of training. Those who had done med school and residency in the same spot all stayed to do their fellowship there. Anecdotal, I know, but probably not entirely unusual.
" 50/50 students from the home institution " - exactly the case in D’s future year 2 of residency. 2 out of 4 spots are “local” - D. and her classmate. It is funny though that D. has met the other 2 on her interviews. They are still “regional”, at least went to Med. School in Midwest, one is MD/PhD, which is kind of “normal” in this research heavy specialty to have at least one MD/PhD. All are females.
D. met a lot of the same faces on her interviews despite the fact that she went all over the country. At the end, they form an “interview friends circle”, supporting each other, going out together and D. even stayed with one of them on one of her NE interviews. It seems that the same places invite the same type of students. I have to say the same "Anecdotal, I know, but probably not entirely unusual ".
It looks to me that the way it plays out depend a lot on specialty.
Article about the new 30 duty hours study:
D1 is at a hospital that is participating in the study. She will have 30 hours duty shifts in ICU starting after Thanksgiving.
^WOWM, mine had many of them. She is glad that her program has many electives, so the longest that she has been in a hospital shifts was only one month. She had 5 of 30 hours shifts in 4 weeks and the level of being tired accumulates. The next one was only 2 weeks, 3 of 30 hours shift, it was easier, but she had to go to a brand new rotation after her post day, she did not have a day off, worked thru the weekend. She is also on various floors and she did not like neurology floor. In few weeks she has another 2 weeks of hospital shifts - going back to her favorite IM floor. She is responsible for entire floor during night, about 25 patients and she is the only MD during night. All together, D. will have only about 5 months of hospital shifts.
Good luck to your D in ICU shift!
How many interviews would be considered “enough”? I think it is true that as long as you have attended the interview at a program, you can then rank it in the match, right?
I once read that 10 may be enough. But recently I read an old thread on SDN that one SDNer found he got into the 13th ranked program. Would this rarely happen or would this happen more often than you think (assuming that it is not a super competitive specialty)?
Going to too many interviews not only costs too much money and takes time, but also is occasionally not feasible due to the conflict of time in the interview trail. Staying at some major city overnight could cost a lot of money as well.
Thanks in advance.
"How many interviews would be considered “enough”? " - I believe it depends on specialty and selectivity of the residency places being applied to. It also depend highly on the number of people from your Med. school applying in your specialty to the same places. I bet that you will see different answers here (and SDN) depending on the experience.
D. knew almost for sure that she did not get one desirable for her interview because they invited 2 other people from her Med. School. You need to plug in your specifics before you will choose who to listen to. I have mentioned several times that out of 9 applicants (including some MD/PhD, who were ahead of everybody else in this specialty that is heavy in research) in D’s class applying to her specialty, only one person who had only 6 specialty interviews did not match and this percentage is higher than nationally in this specialty. The most competition was for the local spots - 3 programs. All 9 applied locally to all 3 programs, but not everybody ranked them as #1 though. But D’s place (next year for her) took 2 locals - my D. and her friend, and it was D’s #1 ranked place and she got her #1 for prelim year also. These 9 people definitely applied to the same places as they applied to the most places in nation in this specialty, from 80% - 100%, yes, some applied to every single program. The competition gets more severe if the place has that many applicants (about 500) for very few spots (2 - 4 sports). You see all of these will not be applicable to some other specialty and dynamics / stats at other medical school, including number of local programs…
If you get an II, you can rank, but one shouldn’t rank if you wouldn’t consider going to because if you match you’re pretty much stuck. Besides cost, another big problem is bringing one’s “A” game to interview especially when traveling back and forth across country in different time zones.
http://www.nrmp.org/match-data/main-residency-match-data/
2015 match data, p. 41 (figure 7): overall 85% of US students get into one of top 4 choices, although this is specialty/program dependent.
My bad: If you get an II and go to interview
In broad generalities, if you are a solid candidate for your specialty, meaning scores and marks are within the range and if there are no red flags, then 10 interviews should be sufficient. If there are issues with your application, you’d better do more, we can all find an SDN story of some poor guy who did 20+ interviews and did not match.
You can get some idea of “enough” by looking at the charting outcomes in the match data. They have a graph showing the number of ranks to the odds of matching into each specialty. Obviously there’s a lot of confounding variables here, but it does give you some sense as to how people derive the target numbers.
For example, using the 2014 edition (http://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Charting-Outcomes-2014-Final.pdf) and looking at anesthesiology we can see that ranking 6 programs (which would mean 6 or more interviews) has a 90% match rate. You top out at 100% at 12 programs ranked.
Family medicine hits 90% at only 2.5 ranks, but doesn’t top out until you get to 18 programs ranked.
Plastic surgery hits 90% at 13 ranks and even at 20 programs ranked hasn’t reached 100%.
Thanks.
DS could go to at least a dozen (not very sure about the exact number) but I heard there will be some time conflict.
I guess scores and marks are within the range, not sure whether he has a red flag. (Not sure if this could be considered as a red flag: he only has a fraction of publications for a particular program for which one SDNer said the AVERAGE number of publications for their admitted students is 30, and he has far less than that.)
Early in the application process, he did have some worry about whether his application has some problems. I think he got IIs from exactly 50% of the programs generally perceived as “top” programs. Wonder if this is a good sign or a bad sign. (maybe just moderately successful at this point of application process?) I have no idea. (I am not very much “in the loop”. His GF is in a better shape to be in the loop (as it should be) than us as parents. LOL.)
Hmm…I do not know for sure, but it seems his list of applications (and the list of IIs) seem to be “top heavy” to me. This could work against him. Not sure why he chose to do that (e.g., almost all of them university programs as far as I know.)
Are there any unusual factors to consider for the residency match similar to the alleged “Tufts Syndrome” that people talk about for the regular undergrad apps?
I decided to have no proactive role in this whole process, restricting myself to responding only when DD calls and initiates discussion about IIs, rejections, and her one actual interview so far at her “home” school. She’s quite high strung and was visibly stunned by her rejection at Ohio State where she thought she had an excellent chance for an interview. I’m however more concerned about the dozen or so interviews she’s planning to attend in the middle of winter.
Supposedly it is all about fit, such a popular CC concept, but theoretically everyone invited for interviews is qualified, then the program wants to see who fits in with their vibe, their style.
Funny thing, as a resident, my DD has found the whole interview process to be way less interesting than it was when she was on the other side!