Going to a not so prestigous school for pre-med?

Bigredmed
Sun, 15 Apr 2007 11:15:31 +0000

First, you only ever match for one. The way it’s set up, there is no choice once the rank lists are in. You open the envelope in March, and that’s it.

Second you don’t even have to finish the residency before applying again. You can repeat the application the next year. One thing that is important to note is that most of the super competitive residency fields require a general PG1 year, either gen surgery or internal med or transitional (where you rotate through a lot of stuff) year before starting on the specific field training. There are some programs which are “categorical” in nature and include that first year of training while others aren’t and as a student, you have to find a single year PG1 program.

That’s kind of confusing. One of my really good friends matched to Arizona for Anesthesia which operates like ophtho and derm and many of the surgical specialties. He will begin his anesthesia program in July of 2008. Arizona was not a categorical program and so he had to find his on transitional year program. On match day he found out he had matched to a community based program in Des Moines (which is where he wanted to go b/c they would pay for his housing) and will be starting there this July.

What this means is that many of these PG2 programs are actually filling spots 2 years out. Knowing that, many of the students may be matching to one year programs. What I’m not sure about, is if the PG2 programs hold spots for people coming that very next year. I suppose if you went into a medicine residency, it wouldn’t matter, you’d apply during your first year, and if you matched on that attempt, you could remain in your medicine program for another year and then in year 3, you’d move to your ophtho program. I assume that would be okay but I’m not sure.

I’m also not sure about if you’d be at an advantage. Since residency programs are used to interviewing an overwhelming majority of candidates who all have the exact same level of clinical experience, I’m not sure it really enters their mind. Besides, residency is meant to be a educational entity, rather than a job. The residency programs are (or at least should be) operating on the idea that they are there to finalize your training, not use you as cheap labor (though that is a secondary benefit). It is about teaching still.

The things though that might work in your favor is having things like USMLE Step 2 results back which may not have been available when programs were finalizing rank lists. There might be some other results or activities that a student participated in that might help them the second time around…I’m just not sure what they are.