Residency Interview Update

So it occurs to me that I should probably start blogging about the residency interview trail as that is what I will be living and breathing over the next two months. First, Anesthesiology is a four year training program, first year is called the Clinical Base Year which can either be a surgery year where I play surgeon’s bitch and run around managing surgery patients so the real surgeons can be in the OR, medicine preliminary where I get to play medicine doc and do pretty much the same stuff as the residents or transitional year which is a mix of both with some obstetrics and pediatrics thrown in. Then there are actually 3 years of Anesthesiology training.

What this means for residency applications is that I will be interviewing for both programs. One track is the internship year interviews and the other is the resdiency interviews. So far I have had two interviews for Anesthesiology and one for preliminary medicine. What’s my goal program? Honestly for intern year I would love to do a preliminary medicine year in a place where I will learn something but not hate my life too much. For anesthesiology, I really have three criteria: work-life balance, high program reputation, mentorship and location. I am hoping to find a warm place with some good mentors and decent hours that will allow me a bit of time to read, enjoy life and who knows maybe even start a business after my training. I throw reputation of program in there for two reasons. First, I suppose I do want a program with a good reputation mostly because I want to feel like I can rely on my training years from now even if I do not do 100% clinical work. As a mentor at Stanford who works mostly in the ICU, does anesthesia a month out of the year in rural Africa and runs a basic science lab told me, you want to get the best training so when you go do something else, you can always have your training to fall back on.

So far, I have interviewed at 2 programs for anesthesiology, DHMC and NYU and one for preliminary medicine St. Luke’s Roosevelt in NYC. They were fun interviews. As my home program, DHMC rates pretty highly on mentorship and work-life balance, decently on reputation of program and low to medium on location. On a gut feel level, I know I will be happy here although I will feel a bit like I am never going to leave. NYU on the other hand rates medium on work-life balance although the chief residents did a pretty good job selling the place and I did see some smiling post-call residents on the way into the room. They rate high on location obviously, medium-low on reputation of program and medium-low on mentorship although I haven’t had a real conversation with any of the attendings yet. Overall gut feel was that it would be an all right place for 3 years but I could do better.

St Luke’s Roosevelt was interesting, I actually thought that the program was pretty well organized with a “drip admissions” system where you get 1 day off consistently every week, staggered blocks of electives throughout the year and never have overnight call. Overall, I think you have 3 really light months, 3 moderate months and 6 heavier months which ain’t bad. I would say its probably a medium-high on work-life, high on location, medium on mentorship, low on reputation. Overall gut feel is pretty moderate.

Next up, Columbia followed by UT Southwestern in Dallas, Baylor in Houston, UCI, UCLA Harbor for prelim then UC Davis and Kaiser Permanente in Oakland and then its off to Chicago for Loyola and Northwestern before a break for the holidays. Wish me luck!