Residency

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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Q&A with Dr. Ali Wong, Plastic Surgery Resident and Creator of Sketchy Medicine

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Dr. Ali Wong is a plastic surgery resident in Nova Scotia, Canada and creator of the website Sketchy Medicine, in which she shares graphical representations of various medical concepts. Dr. Wong received her Bachelor of Science with Honours in Neuroscience (2009) and her MD (2013) at Dalhousie University. Following initial year in residency, she went on to receive an MSE (Master of Science in Engineering) from Johns Hopkins University (2016). Dr. Wong has been published in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Journal of Hand Therapy, and Behavioral Brain Research.

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Jump Starting Your Job Search While In Medical School: Part 5

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Read  about steps 1 and 2 in Part 1 of this series  here.
Read  about steps 3 and 4 in Part 2 of this series  here.
Read  about steps 5 and 6 in Part 3 of this series  here.
Read  about steps 7 and 8 in Part 4 of this series  here.
One day in the future, all your work will have paid off: You’ll have finished your job interviews and you will be fielding job offers. OK, so it’s a ways away in the future. But it’s valuable to understand the process now; you can spend your time focusing on opportunities that are a true fit for your interests and values. This laser focus on what you want and what you’re good at will mean that the job offers coming your way will be good fits for you. Then, the challenge is simply choosing one.

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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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How The Timing of your Doctor Job Search Could Lead to a Financial Windfall

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You most likely believe the best time to start your medical job search is late autumn of the final year of training. That’s the standard advice, but it may not be the best for you. First, you will be just one of many job-applicants fighting for limited openings. Secondly, you will not have adequate time for preparation—you need your market value report and negotiation skills training completed before you start the process. In the rush to prepare for board exams, move, find a place to live, and find a job all at the same time you may have to skip the prep work and might not be able to bargain for the best deal.

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Division of Labor: How to Keep a Household Running While Your Spouse is In Training

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Medical Spouse

By Amy Rakowczyk, SDN Staff Writer

One of the biggest challenges that arises during medical school is actually all of the non-medical school “stuff”: namely, household duties and chores. How much help can you expect from your spouse in this regard, and how will you divide up the duties?

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How To Make New Friends and Find A Community

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Medical Spouse

If your spouse’s medical studies have recently brought you to a new city, or to a new community within a familiar city, you will need to search for new friends and support groups. Medical school is not about being “strong” and pushing through all the hard stuff. It’s about having people to lean on when the going gets tough.
Building yourself a new community and finding friends, especially those that you hope to be able to share your delightful, as well as dark moments with, is not an easy task. However, it is a necessary one!

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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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