Residency and The Match

Once you complete medical school, you must complete a residency to practice medicine. Learn more about the Match, residencies, different specialties, and life as a resident physician.

What To Expect: Intern Year

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Medical Spouse

You’ve likely heard the rumors about the dreaded Intern Year. It’s the worst of the worst. Say goodbye to your partner and hello to lonely days and nights. But are the rumors really true? And if they are, what can you do about it?

I remember when my husband was a few months into MS3, and we were feeling the med school blues. Third year was particularly challenging for my family, so I already felt like my life and relationship were struggling. One day, I happened to attend a “Baby and Me” yoga class with my nine-month old, and the mom sitting next to me started a conversation by asking me what my husband did. I replied “he’s in medical school,” and she just laughed and shook her head. She replied, “My husband is an intern. I wish someone had told me how horrible it was going to be. If you think it’s bad now, just wait. It gets so much worse.”

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Changing Your Mind—And Your Specialty

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I’ve written about choosing a medical specialty throughout the third and even fourth years of medical school, but further discussion is warranted regarding the students who don’t choose a specialty in this “typical” timeframe. It is worth mentioning first of all: many people change their minds for many different reasons. I continue to be impressed by the students, residents, and attendings I meet who took circuitous and sometimes truly fascinating routes to become physicians. The same is true for finding one’s niche as a certain type of physician. Many students feel like everyone else has things figured out, but the truth is the path is not always clear cut. Even when the majority achieve a certain stage (e.g. practicing physician) by the standard route, there are always exceptions, and students may be surprised and encouraged at the myriad ways they can reach their career goals.

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Creating Your Residency Rank List for Match Day

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rank list

This time of year medical students are beginning to think of where they may match for residency. At this point in the application cycle, most candidates have completed a number of interviews and have an idea of what characteristics make up their ideal program. However, many candidates consider only a handful of major criteria when making their rank list. Some of these include geography, academic vs nonacademic focus, class size, salary, living cost, and opportunities for fellowship. Although these are great factors to think about, they shouldn’t be the only factors residency applicants consider. 

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Getting What You Want: Considering Both Life and Career Goals When Choosing a Specialty

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Chronicles of a Med Student

Under the glow of the OR lights, I could barely make out the pulsating artery through all the layers of fat. This is so cool I thought to myself. Since my first rotation had been internal medicine, I hadn’t seen a lot of hands on stuff like this. As the OB/GYN swiftly cut through the layers of fascia to get to the target ovary, I watched her quick hands harvest it and pull it out of the body cavity. The ovary itself was grossly misshapen as she gently laid it onto the mayo stand to clean it up before shipping it off to pathology. I held it in my hands and thought of how the patient would no longer have to bear the burden of the things this overgrowth was doing to her body. The surgery was a success and the doctor predicted a very good outcome and quality of life for the young patient from now on. How incredible!

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Applying for Residency

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Last month I wrote about the early part of 4th year as a kind of second-look for medical students – an occasion for confirming specialty choice, or perhaps changing one’s mind altogether. For me, it has been an enjoyable and enlightening process to revisit the specialties I was most interested in and examine them more thoroughly, paying attention to finer details as I considered what a career in that specialty would entail beyond the years of residency. The specialty decision is often made on just a few weeks of exposure and may be highly influenced by observing residents, but it is important to remember that residency is relatively brief in the context of a career, and thus it is imperative to get opinions on the field of choice from practicing attending physicians. I have been grateful for opportunities to do just this; rotating through a field a second or third time has enabled me to make this aspect more of a priority.

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Choosing a Specialty: Taking a Second Look

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fourth year

By Brent Schnipke

As I have spoken with physicians, residents, and other medical students about the process of choosing a medical specialty, the near-universal reply has something to do with the fact that third-year rotations barely offer enough exposure to each specialty to make an informed decision. Third-year medical students move quickly between specialties, and are often granted only a few weeks to examine a given career choice and decide whether they like it or not. Because of this, major decisions about how a medical student will practice as a doctor are largely based on brief experiences that can be easily biased by particular patients, residents, attendings, hospital systems, and even external life factors. To control for these variables, most students will finish their third year and use the first part of their fourth year to take a “second look” at the specialty they are planning to apply for and to help those students who remain undecided.

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Switching Specialties: Why It’s Never Too Late to Try Something Different

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switching specialties

“So if you don’t mind me asking, why did you make the switch?”

I get that question quite often. I honestly never grow tired of answering it because that’s always when I launch into what rekindled my spark for being a physician.

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The Future of MD/DO Residencies Under Single Accreditation

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Recently, the Accrediting Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) announced that by 2020, all allopathic and osteopathic residency programs would come together under one umbrella accreditation system. This is a significant shift away from the historical separation between MD and DO programs. DocThoughts’ Host, Nirmal Gosalia, invited Dr. John Potts, Senior VP of Surgical Accreditation at the ACGME and key leader in the implementation of the Single GME System, to clarify the decision and its future impact on graduate medical education. 

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Residency: The Interview and Selection Process

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Medical Spouse

Residency applications! The light at the end of the tunnel, and the process that will chart the course for the next 3+ years of your life and your spouse’s medical career. No big deal, or anything! It is an incredibly exciting time, while also being quite unsettling. Here’s what to expect and how to make it as joyful of a process as possible.

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Popular Specialty Areas – and What Med Students Should Know About Them

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popular specialty areas

For medical school students, perhaps one of the most difficult choices to be made in the course of their education is what area of medicine to specialize in—or whether to go into general practice. Part of this problem is the wide variety of specialties to choose from: the AMA lists around 200 medical specialties and sub-specialties.

Part of it also may be that there are a variety of factors–from expected income to the demand for certain specialties to the personalities and preferences of the individual medical student–to be taken into consideration before a decision can be made. Understanding all of these factors can take some time, but it can also make this very important decision a little easier.

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