2010 Match Preseason, Part 4: Researching Residency Programs, by phoenixMD
As you begin the final leg of what has been a long journey towards your Residency, there still remain many important decisions to be made. At the top of that list is the inevitable questions: Which hospitals are right for me? In some respects, deciding what programs to apply to and how to rank those programs can prove more difficult than any multiple choice question you saw on the USMLE’s. Choosing the wrong answer on a Step 1 question and slightly lowering your score is one thing. Ending up at the wrong hospital because of an uninformed decision, well, that’s life-changing.
Fortunately, all the intricacies of The Match have resulted in a process that is remarkably successful placing the right doctors and the right hospitals, year after year. The one caveat is that for you to benefit from the process, you’re going to do what all the residency programs will be doing to fill their positions: put every potential candidate under a microscope and figure out which ones fit your unique situation, needs & requirements.
If you look at the bottom right corner of your computer screen, you will find and should be thankful for the reason why research for you will be easier, faster, and more accurate than ever before. No, not your anti-virus software, which is probably expired anyway. It’s the DATE. You’re in 2009, baby!
The majority of the methods that will be discussed below are year 2009 advantages that those poor residency applicants back in 1989 didn’t have. Sure they had Gameboy, the New Kids On The Block, and Back to the Future II, but you have smartphones (with games built in), can download any resource you can think of (hopefully not NKOTB songs), and with the internet can research back to anything to help you decide your future. Let’s take a look at your options.
FREIDA - www.ama-assn.org/go/freida or if you want to access directly on your 'Zone > http://www.theusmlezone.com/public/index.php?option=com_wrapper&view=wrapper&Itemid=123
The first tool you should get to know is FREIDA (Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database). This system is ‘an online lists information for all the 8,600 graduate medical education programs accredited by the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education, as well as 200 Board-approved combined specialty programs, such as internal medicine/psychiatry. Users can search for training programs by selecting specialties, states, or even training institutions.’
The information you’ll find on each program is result of an annual survey that asks each program about their vitals, facts & statistics. Within the wealth of information, you’ll find things like contact information, the # of interviews conducted during the previous match cycle, salary structures, on-call frequency, and if the program uses the, ‘night float’ system. FREIDA will also allow you to organize/save your searches for future reference and even print mailing labels for each program. Many use FREIDA as their first filter to build their initial, ‘wish list’ of hospitals.
Previous Match stats, unfilled positions list
Each year after the dust settles on the March Match, it’s organizers - the NRMP – release a list that contains useful information about how each program faired during that Match. There publish several PDF files, with the following being the most valuable in terms of using them to help you in the coming application season:
New>2009 Match Results by State, Specialty, and Applicant Type (PDF, 17 pages)
Provides a summary of the number of positions offered and filled by state, specialty, and applicant type for the 2009 Main Residency Match. Data for prior years are also available.
New>Program Results, 2005-2009 (PDF, 121 pages)
Provides program quotas and number of positions filled for all programs participating in the Main Residency Match between 2005 and 2009. Data for prior years are also available.
Results of the 2008 NRMP Program Director Survey (PDF, 144 pages)
This report presents the results of selected items from the 2008 NRMP Program Director Survey. Data are reported for 19 specialties and include: (1) factors used for granting interviews and ranking applicants; (2) use of USMLE exam scores; and (3) the percentage of interview slots filled prior to the November 1 release date of the MSPE.
Charting Outcomes in the Match: Characteristics of Applicants Who Matched to Their Preferred Specialty in the 2007 NRMP Main Residency Match (2nd edition) (PDF, 139 pages)
This report casts light on how applicant qualifications affect match success. To request the report in PowerPoint format, contact NRMP Research Director at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
Each report can be a valuable resource for you and give you a more clear picture on what you can expect in the future based on what you have seen happen in the past. You can use these lists to verify or solidify that you will meet the criteria for a particular program.
The, ‘unfilled positions’ lists is considered a dependable way to assess how, ‘easy’ it is to get into a program. For an non-US based medical students, the hospitals with the most unfilled positions are often viewed as likely, ‘IMG-friendly’. Bear in mind that no program wants to have to fill their positions via the, ‘Post-Match Scramble’ because, well, you are choosing from a set of candidates that other hospitals, for one reason or another, did not want. While they can get lucky and find one of the many excellent doctors that participate in Scramble, it the least dependable way for the program to find a candidate that truly fits into their program. If you see a program with an unusually high amount of unfilled positions, it is likely it will do anything to avoid the same fate during YOUR match. Those adjustments may include lowering their minimum Step score requirements, offering more pre-matches, or inviting a wider range of candidates for interviews.
Google – News
While this research option can be somewhat useful during the early parts of the Match, it can be become invaluable for your interview prep. As a, ‘preseason’ tool, googling a hospital can tell you how competitive a hospital will be based on recent new worthy activity there. For example, the hospital where they chose to bring the late Michael Jackson to in his final moments – UCLA Medical – may see a jump in applications this year. In contrast, another hospital that recently amputated the wrong leg might scare away potential applicants. Researching programs & their hospitals via Google News can give you a sense of how popular a program may be in the coming Match.
As an interview research tool, the advice is to know everything about a program. Being able to answer questions about a program’s specifics or discuss recent events involving the hospitals demonstrates that you cared enough to research every aspect of the program for which you are applying. We will go into further detail on this in a separate article dealing with Interviews.
Online Forums
If you’re on www.theusmlezone.com right now, you’ve probably been to the multitude of sites centered around forums. They are a great source of information from uniquely qualified resources – your peers that have come before you. In the case of a research tool for residency, they are a great place to hunt down posts of previous applicants and current residents that may have experience at a hospital you are considering applying to or interviewing at.
Go to any given forum and type in a search for the hospital(s) that are on you, ‘wish list’. The hope is that you find previous interviewees from either the previous or even the current Match year that have posted about their experience at a particular program.
If you’re lucky, and it does happen, you may run into current residents at a program to give you insider advice/tips/observations. Some residents do something similar to what I do when I buy a new gadget. I’ll buy something and even AFTER I know it’s good (or bad), I’ll go to Amazon.com to see what people are saying about it. Residents on a boring on-call sometimes do the same thing. You have anonymity, they have anonymity…milk them for all the info they’ve got.
Residency Program Website
Of course! What better place to find out about a program then to go to their website. While it is the last place you would look for an unbiased opinion, there are still bits of information that can help you with your decision. These program details will be essential if you are invited to and accept an interview, particularly when the inevitable questions is asked, “ So do you have any questions for me?” The last thing you want to do is ask a question where the answer can be found on their website, which would result in the last response from the interviewer you want to hear, “If you had cared enough to take the time to look at our website, you’d know the answer to your own question.” Ouch.
Popular things to find out about a program via their website include info on how many affiliate hospitals they have and where are they located (as you may have to rotate at one point at one of those affiliates), information on ongoing and future research, plans for expansion of the hospital (which hopefully benefits your specialty), and facts & figures about the hospital facilities (# of patient beds, # of O.R’s, cool next generation equipment, etc).
*SideNote : As a doc involved with a website, you can, to some extent, judge a program by the quality of their website. The development, design and maintenance of a site can be very costly in terms of both manpower & funding. While not an absolute rule, bigger, more well funded hospitals (usually university-based programs) tend to have very pretty and useful sites and it’s not simply because they can afford it. You’ll find that they NEED it because of the amount of volume they do or because their offerings for patients & doctors are in such abundance that it’s the only way to properly deliver quality information about their programs & services. The take away for you as an applicant for that type of hospital is that you may be dealing with a, ‘double-edged sword’, in that while the program may have a relatively high number of available positions, the competition for those positions increases exponentially.
In contrast, you may find a correlation with some hospitals that have websites that are either one page sites or look like they were created in 1996 (aka fugly). This is not necessarily a reflection of the quality of a program. However, it would seem likely that a program with a low-quality website would not be on the cutting edge in terms of hospital equipment or may be in a poor, severely under served area where having a website is not a necessity to draw business.
Networking with IMG’s from previous years
Our last option is the one that doctors applying for residency have used way before the birth of the internet. However, the growth of social networks like Facebook, Myspace, and your very own Medbook on The USMLE Zone! (such a shameless plug), 2009 will see more applicants using the internet to get in touch with people that can help them with the residency process.
These social/professional webs would include alumni from your school, former classmates at a USMLE prep program like Kaplan, Falcon or Pass, former doctors you worked in clinical with, even people you just happen to befriend on a website. While often times they can’t help you get an interview – you’d really need someone with some serious pull to do that – they can provide you with incite about a program that would be specific to your needs and they can do that because they know your history/personality to some extent. One thing that you’ll also be able to appreciate is that they’ll usually be brutally honest with you.
So that’s our look into some of the popular methods you can use when researching the residency training programs across the country. The most important part of your search begins before you even make your first, ‘wish list’ : be realistic about which programs & specialties you apply to. You should also keep an open mind about where you’d be willing to apply, as some of the lesser known programs outside of the popular NYC/Chicago hubs may not only pleasantly surprised you, but could end up being a perfect fit for you!
Can You See It?
Congratulations on getting to this point. For the most part, shopping around for programs should be a fun, albeit exhausting process. If you feel like the application process seems like it will be too tedious or stressful, I ask you to look back to the second week after you began studying Step 1 and could not even fathom seeing the end of the tunnel. Done looking back? Good, now look ahead and enjoy the first rays of light at the end of your tunnel.
~ Dr Brian
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