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The Internship Quest
The
2008 National Residency Matching Plan (NRMP) results are summarized at http://www.aamc.org/nrmp/. The 2008 match rate for U.S. allopathic rose .8 percent to 94.2 percent, the highest in more than thirty years. Students applying
to programs in Radiology, Dermatology and Ophthalmology are in competition,
not only with their peers, but with individuals who have already done one,
two, or even three years of postgraduate training in another field. Students who do
not match to their choice of specialty in the fourth year and then re-apply
during internship to the same specialty have less than a 50% success rate the
second time around and about a 10% success rate in Ophthalmology, Emergency
Medicine and Orthopedics. Almost all residencies are in the NRMP Match. There are small, independent, early matches which include Ophthalmology, and Urology (PGY-2 - PGY-3, etc.). The NRMP is the BIG Match which includes all internships (PGY-1) and PGY-2 specialties, except for the three listed above. Information regarding each Match can be found on the Web. Note the following Websites and relevant dates.
Students can enroll with the NRMP at www.nrmp.org, starting on Aug 15, 2008. You must read the NRMP Guidelines for the Match. All students who expect to graduate must enter the Match. You may withdraw in the future. Those on Armed Forces Scholarships must apply for Armed Forces postgraduate education programs. These results are announced early, usually December. If you match in that program, you will then be withdrawn from the NRMP. If you decide you do not wish to enter PGY-1 at this time, you may withdraw after consulting with your Faculty Advisor. The NRMP requires that the AssociateDean for Medical Education must approve any withdrawals so please notify the Office as soon as you know you wish to withdraw. Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS) (some information taken directly from the ERAS literature sent to our site and to students) ERAS was developed by the Association of American Medical Colleges to transmit residency applications and supporting credentials from applicants and medical schools to residency program directors using the Internet. ERAS was first used during the 1995-96 residency application process in Ob/Gyn and has expanded each year so that this year almost every graduating senior will use ERAS. ERAS 2009 will be used by most residency programs in anesthesiology, dermatology, diagnostic radiology, emergency medicine, family practice, general surgery, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, orthopaedic surgery, pathology, pediatrics, physical medicine and rehabilitation, psychiatry, transitional year programs, all Army and Navy GME-1 positions, and combined family practice-psychiatry, internal medicine-emergency medicine, internal medicine-family practice, internal medicine-pediatrics, internal medicine-psychiatry and internal medicine physical medicine, rehabilitation programs, nuclear medicine, plastic surgery, radiation oncology and pediatrics/psychiatry/child psychiatry. A list of final participating programs will be posted on the ERAS web site in late May. ERAS processing fees are based on the number of programs selected. ERAS 2008 fees, per specialty, were: Up to 10 programs
$60 The Office of Medical Education will coordinate the ERAS system for the medical students at Stony Brook. ERAS 2009 registration will be done on-line. An ERAS token is mandatory. The token provides access to MyERAS (the Applicant workstation) and allows applicants to create their ERAS account on the web. ERAS tokens and manuals will be distributed to all students the first week of July. Students should not confuse NRMP (Main Match) with ERAS. Registering for ERAS does not register applicants with the NRMP, nor vice versa. Applicants must register with both NRMP and ERAS to participate in the services of each program. Additional information on ERAS can be found at www.aamc.org/students/eras. Students are urged to refer to this site for answers to "Frequently Asked Questions" regarding the ERAS process. Click here to check out the ERAS Web Page.
The program at Stony Brook is spearheaded by Dr. Latha Chandran in the Office of Academic Advising. You will receive specifics regarding the program from them.
The type of patient interactions that you seek are often a highly determinant factor in choosing a Primary Care field versus a more technically oriented sub-specialty. One's views of future goals re: academia, geography, and lifestyle, are considerations which are often important determinants in arranging a list of programs. You should be both ambitious and careful in preparing your list. You should approach the process with pride and confidence and have on your list some "dreams", as well as a solid number of "realistic" possibilities, as well as some "stoppers". The most common error in applications is to include only programs with the same degree of difficulty and not to have breadth. Your Advisor should be very helpful in aiding you to develop an appropriately ambitious list. You should make a list of those Faculty members whom you may wish to write letters of recommendation for you. The strongest letter of recommendation will come from the individuals who have a very close, personal acquaintance with you. This is more important than the academic rank of the individual writing the letter. You should have a total of three letters, in addition to the med stud perf eval. Applications to the larger specialties (Medicine, Surgery, Pediatrics, and Obstetrics) may also require a Departmental letter summarizing your experiences with that Department and assessing your potential for postgraduate training in that field. You should contact the Educational Coordinator in that Department to arrange such a letter. When requesting a letter from a Faculty member, you should first inquire whether the Faculty member is willing to write a strong letter in support of your application and provide the Faculty member with information about your future plans. · ERAS applicants
should print both the Request for Letter of Recommendation and LOR Cover
Sheet for each faculty member that will write a letter for you. This will
identify you as an ERAS applicant and explain the special procedures to
prepare a letter for ERAS. If you submitted a letter of recommendation earlier in the year, please be sure to let Burke & Bonnie know that you will use that letter as a part of your ERAS application so that they know to pull it from the academic files. Once
a Faculty member has agreed to write a letter in support of your application,
be sure to follow-up on the letter's status. Again, the receipt of a letter
in my office is confirmation that it has been sent out to others on your
list. The
MSPE is an archive of your medical school performance and is meant to
represent an objective assessment of how you have done. It is a stylized
letter. The majority of the letter is compiled of the clerkship comments
entered into Cbase, which is the major determinant factor of the strength of
your application. You are strongly encouraged to monitor your academic file.
If you have an evaluation that you believe to be grossly unfair, you may
appeal it to the clerkship supervisor. Do not wait until late in the MSPE
process to seek such remediation. Also, make every effort to avoid
Incompletes on the transcript that is sent out. This means that any
third-year details should be cleaned up by September 1. There is now a
section in Cbase where you can enter information about activities in which
you have been involved. This is a good way to keep track of special information
you might want to ask to have put into your letter. You will also be prompted
to enter your CV & a personal statement into Cbase. Please read your
emails regularly as this is how information about this process will be
communicated to you.
Transcripts will be sent out with the MSPE and are generated by Burke Kincaid in the Office of Student Affairs. Students in an early match must follow the sfmatch website instructions carefully as the process is run much more independently of the OME office support than the NRMP match. Many
programs will require that USMLE results be sent electronically directly from
the National Board of Medical Examiners in
For AMA medical
students and resident physician members, FREIDA Online (www.ama-assn.org)
provides a mailing label service. Two sets of labels for 30 or fewer programs
will be provided at no charge. An AMA membership number is required to
execute a label request. Non-members can request labels for a fee. Labels
should be distributed to your letter writers and to the Office of Medical
Education. Staff please be sure to include a label for Dr. Frederick M.
Schiavone, Associate Dean for Med Ed, HSC, Level 4, Room 157,
You are encouraged to apply to programs even if you are just considering them. You do not have to interview at or rank unwanted programs but you cannot apply after deadlines. The Couples Match still allows considerable flexibility and has worked well in almost all situations. The strategy that has worked the best is to focus on larger urban areas with a variety of training programs that can allow each of the individuals flexibility in the rank list. A common error for those focused on sub-specialty training at the PGY-2 level is to pay insufficient attention to the PGY-1 year. You should treat this as a separate and important application process which will require a modification of your Personal Statement indicating why the PGY-1 year is an important part of your overall postgraduate training. It is reasonable to consider additional letters that are specifically addressed enhancing your PGY-1 application. Failure to give sufficient attention to the PGY-1 application has been a most common reason for Stony Brook seniors to go unmatched during the past five years.
9.
Confirmation: a. Remember, the supporting staff helps you through this process. Be kind, humble and honest. b. If your applications are complete, ask to schedule an interview. If they do not schedule you, they will tell you their policy (by invitation only, etc.). Speaking to the programs (at least the secretary) and showing your sincere interest will help at least to get interviews in the more competitive programs. c. If incomplete, ask what is missing. Ask to schedule an interview anyway. If they need complete applications, they will tell you...get all of your missing data in - MSPE, other letters, etc. Call again in a week to confirm. Interview
offers are likely to begin soon after applications are complete. ERAS
interviews are usually arranged electronically. Remember, MSPE do not go out
until November 1. If you have not heard after one month, call. Changing the
date of your interview does not look bad, especially if you are trying to
organize your interviews by location (i.e. all
After you have had an interview, it is reasonable but not mandatory that you send a thank-you note for the hospitality extended to you. There is a semi-courtship that goes on in which students express their interest in the program and programs may express interest in students. While flattering, these commitments should not be taken too seriously. In January and/or February, you will enter your Match list on the NRMP website. This can be done anywhere that you can access the website. If you plan to be away when you enter your list, be sure to bring all necessary information with you as no one else will know or have your password to access the Rank Order Site. Do not list any programs in which you would not feel comfortable as a house officer. It is better to be unmatched than to be matched to a program in which you begin with a fundamentally negative attitude. Once the Match is closed during the third week of February, 2009, you are committed to the results. Match results will be released Thursday, March 19th, at Noon. They will also be announced on the NRMP website. STUDENTS WHO ARE UNMATCHED WILL BE NOTIFIED BY THE Office of Medical Education ON MONDAY, MARCH 16TH. The NRMP allows students to electronically learn whether they have matched on Monday but does not release the specifics of where the students matched until Thursday. IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT WE KNOW HOW TO GET IN TOUCH WITH ALL STUDENTS ON MONDAY AFTERNOON; AND IF YOU HAVE RECENTLY MOVED, IT IS CRITICAL THAT YOU HAVE AN UP-TO-DATE ADDRESS AND TELEPHONE NUMBER IN CBASE AT THAT TIME. No electives out of the nearby NYC metropolitan area are approved for Match week.
You will enhance your opportunities by observing the schedule outlined in Figure 1 and avoiding the pitfalls listed in Table 5. Table 5
Figure 1 GENERAL RESIDENCY APPLICATION TIMELINE (figure1) A part of every application process is the preparation of a personal or autobiographical statement. Generally speaking, the application forms for residency positions will request a personal statement. In other instances in which you are preparing your credentials for a job or another type of position, you will want to include the substance of a personal statement in the form of a cover letter to your CV. A personal statement serves to complement and supplement your CV with a description of your qualifications and strengths in narrative form. Like a CV, it is written for a specific purpose or position. You want to convey to your reader how and why you are qualified for the position to which you are applying. In the case of a residency position, you want to make clear the basis of your interest in that specialty and in that particular program. Feel free to highlight items in your CV if they help to remind your reader of the experiences you’ve had that make you well prepared for the position. This is your opportunity to expand upon activities that are just listed in the CV but deserve to be described in order for your reader to appreciate the breadth and depth of your involvement in them. You may choose to relate significant personal experiences but do so only if they are relevant to your candidacy for the position. Lastly, the personal statement is the appropriate place to specify your professional goals. Far from a meaningless exercise, the ability to put down on paper some clear, realistic and carefully considered goals will leave your reader with a strong impression of your maturity, self-awareness and character. Related to this last point, the importance of good writing skills cannot be overemphasized. The quality of your writing in the preparation of a personal statement is at least as important as the content. Unfortunately, not only are good writing skills allowed to deteriorate during medical school, in some sense, they are deliberately undermined in the interest of learning to write concise histories and physicals. For the moment, forget everything you know about writing H & P’s. While preparing your personal statement try to:
HOW TO PREPARE YOUR CURRICULUM VITAE While you may not have yet had the experience of preparing a formal curriculum vitae ("course of life"), you are already familiar with its function and the type of information that goes into it from having filled out applications for employment, for college, or for that matter, medical school. Indeed, one of the primary functions of a CV is to provide a succinct chronicle of your past experience and training. In a sense, a CV is a multi-purpose, personal application form for employment, for educational opportunities, for honors and awards, or for membership or participation in an organization. Learning to prepare a good CV now will aid you throughout your professional life. It is a living, not a static document, that is to be continually updated and changed as new experiences or accomplishments are completed. Despite its multiple purposes, your CV must be restructured and rewritten, or at least reviewed, for each specific purpose for which it is to be used. It might be entirely inappropriate to include a lengthy list of publications in a CV you are submitting as application for membership in a volunteer organization. On the other hand, it might be imperative to include this information, if not in the body of, at least as an appendix to, a CV you are submitting to obtain an academic position. Some experts recommend maintaining two versions of your CV -- one, a short summary of your training and experience, and the other, a longer version with more detailed information about your publications and presentations. In general, however, no CV should be a lengthy document. No matter how many accomplishments you list, you don’t impress anybody if they can’t quickly pick out two or three good reasons to choose you over someone else. Let your CV help you put your best foot forward. Sometimes, a CV is referred to as a "resume". In fact, these terms are probably interchangeable. In academic or educational circles, we tend to use the word curriculum vitae or CV more frequently than resume. Because of the nature of the medical profession, where the years for preparation are highly structured and generally comparable from institution to institution, a chronological format for the medical CV is often preferred. Alternatively, resumes are sometimes written in other formats such as the functional format, which de-emphasizes the chronology of experience and emphasizes, instead, the specific skills, knowledge or responsibility accumulated at each level. This format is ideal for the business executive who wants to highlight the fact that, in his first job out of college, he had managerial responsibility for the work of eight other people. However, it would be unusual, if not entirely ludicrous, for a medical student to state in his CV that, while in medical school, he mastered the art of delayed gratification and tested the limits of short-term memory recall. Still, there may be instances in which you would want to prepare your CV or resume in something other than a chronological format. For example, at some point, you may want to try an analytical format which combines some of the functions of an autobiographical statement with the CV itself. That is, instead of just listing your work experiences you would discuss them as a whole, pointing out where you have derived certain strengths that qualify you for the position to which you are applying. There are many reference books on different formats for preparing CVs. Some of these are listed below. For the purposes of applying to residency training programs, a chronological format is very appropriate for most medical students. Here are some tips to help you get started:
Later you will add separate categories for "Post-graduate Training" (includes residencies and fellowships), "Practice Experience", "Academic Appointments", and "Certification and Licensure".
Keep in mind that, by federal law, employers are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of age, race, sex, religion, national origin, or handicap status. Therefore, you do not have to provide this information. Discrimination on the basis of sex includes discrimination on the basis of child-rearing plans, i.e., number of children or plans to have children. On the other hand, it is perfectly legal for you to volunteer this information. You may elect to include it in your CV if you feel it is pertinent to your candidacy for the position. For example, you may specifically want to include marital status, if you are married, to prompt a discussion of maternity/paternity leave policies or child-care responsibilities during the residency interview process. Likewise, you may feel you want the program director to know how old you are, if, for some reason, you think your age is an advantage. If you do include your age, do so by listing birth date, not age in years. Although, the following items appear quite frequently, they are probably not necessary and may be unwise to include in a CV. These items include social security numbers, licensure numbers and examination scores. If this information is pertinent to your candidacy, it will be asked for in the application or at some later point in the application process. Do try to include a list of your outside interests or extracurricular activities in this section or in a separate section. It will help to develop a broader picture of your personality and character. Also any special talents or qualifications which have not been given due recognition in other parts of the CV should be highlighted here or in a separate section. For example, you will want to include things like fluency in other languages, ACLS certification, etc.
Timeline for General Residency Application Timeline for General Residency Application Review resource material: May through November Surf the Web, Talk to your Advisor: May through November Prepare autobiographical sketch: May through August Request reference letters: May through January Arrange MSPE interview: July through September Uniform release date for MSPE: November 1st Send application form to programs (non-ERAS programs): September through December Schedule program interview: September through December Register with the NRMP online: starting August 15th Interview at programs: October through January Follow up correspondence: October through January Ranking time for program and student: Mid-January to mid-February Deadline for submission of rank order lists: February 25, 2009 Match Day – March 19, 2009 |
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Page last updated by M.London on 6-19-08 |