Residency Match Thread

With Match Day on March 15th, I am starting this thread for the Med Schools graduates to let everybody know where they are going for residency.

A closely held secret until March 15! j

Now I can announce that I’m headed to the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. My girlfriend and I couples-matched, and she matched to the Brigham and Women’s across the street. This combination was our first choice–for me the BIDMC was my choice because of its primary care-oriented approach to HIV care, while she chose the BWH for a variety of other reasons. I’m kind of exhausted right now, but I’m glad its done. More soon.


j

Excellent news Joe–good luck at BIDMC! (We had our baby there so I’m a bit biased)

Joe,


Congrats!! Now sit back and enjoy the remainder of fourth year. You’ll need the rest for intern year :slight_smile:


Tara

Joe, congrats to both of you! You guys did good.


Mary

Congrats, Joe! Will you be doing any writing or radio in the area?

Thanks guys.


We were very privileged in our residency search. The two hospitals are competitors, but they also cooperate in some ways: they say they’re going to try to coordinate our call schedules, and it looks like we’ll sometimes be able to do some oncology rotations together on a Dana Farber service where BIDMC and BWH residents staff the teams together, and at the VA, where BIDMC, BWH and Boston Medical Center residents all work together.


I’m going to try and write about the process in a separate thread.


As for the radio: I’ve been mostly working on my thesis, which I hope will eventually see the light of day in some form (but may not until I’m done with residency!), and there are some radio pieces that are sitting somewhere in an NPR hard drive, all ready to be played, but they haven’t aired. (Sometimes it’s as long as a year, or even longer, after they’re recorded.) And I’m trying to work on some more before internship starts. I’d like to think I could keep writing during residency, but patient care and sleep come before writing, so I’m not sure that’ll happen.


joe


PS: Tara, every time I read a new article about head injuries among returning soldiers, I think of you and how important your work is going to be. I hope that as spring starts to peek its head out you are starting to get excited about your next step.

Hey all! I’ll be at U Buffalo for Emergency Medicine.

Congratulations!

Congrats tae!

Congrats to all that matched! what a grueling hair pulling process…not looking forward to it.

Congrats! to everyone, I have a general question, What is asked for in the Residency interview?


DO you submit undergrad transcripts, some have told me no unless asked in the interview they seem to not care about undergrad?

I was not asked for undergrad transcripts or MCAT scores, but I have heard of it being done. The application consisted of: Dean’s letter, medical school transcript, personal statement which can be customized for each program you apply to, and letters of recommendation. Oh, and a photo. You will fill out an on-line application that is kind of like the AMCAS one, where you list publications, extracurrics, those sorts of things, and this is compiled by the ACGME into a sort of resume, but I also wrote my own one-page resume and included that as well.


I don’t know how the offshore schools handle these things, but at my school, the Dean’s office handled all the paper and they scanned in LORs & such. This is an evolving process each year, but judging by the applications I read this year for our program, it appeared to work about the same as it did three years ago when I was applying.


You hear about some programs having somewhat malicious interviews - e.g. you are put on the spot, asked to respond to a clinical scenario, answer an anatomy question, or in some other way pimped. Perhaps the ultra-competitive programs have to do some extra stuff to make fine distinctions among applicants. I didn’t encounter any of that in my interviews in FM, but I did hear of some other FM interviews that included “what if” clinical scenarios as part of the day.


In FM, basically, we just want to be sure you’re someone we’d like to work with and patients would respond well to. Every year, to my surprise, there are people who can’t do the interview equivalent of walking and chewing gum at the same time - e.g., making very inappropriate jokes or asking questions that demonstrate that they not only didn’t do their research about the program, but don’t really know what the specialty is about… fortunately these are few and far between.


Mary

Thanks Mary, yeah I heard of the Undergrad stuff in the Competitive residency interviews, guess they are looking for what ever they can to compare and Choose? I’m working on a prematch deal in Rural GA so I think I’ll be fine with what ever? I hope it all works out just gotta get through step one and then meet with the program director as planned LOL


I have a friend helping me they already have the deal for him, now he’s got me, and this program always has empty spots it seems…

That’s great Tae! It’s great to go through the whole OPM process, from pre-med to MD, and know that others are doing the same thing. Congratulations. j

Efex, the degree of hair-pulling really depends on specialty. If you’re in a super-competitive specialty, then there is probably some hair-pulling until the very end. But in many other cases, programs do let you know some things about where (more or less) you stand with them. Of course you can’t totally trust that–“ranked highly” or even “ranked to match” could mean a number of different things–but you do start getting a sense of how it’s going to go even before you put in your list. One of the advisors at our school talked about the Scramble, and said,“It’s always worrying for us as advisors, because usually, when we have someone go into the Scramble, it’s because they got bad advising–or they didn’t listen to the good advice they got.”


–j

CONGRATS TO YOU ALL!

Thanks Joe! I am definitely not going into a competitive specialty so it’s good to hear that it is not as bad as some make it out to be…

Congratulations everyone! It’s exciting to have been an OPMer long enough to be seeing people go the entire way through the process!