Sunday, June 25, 2017

Intern year starts in 6 days

In anticipation of the start of family medicine internship, I have been thinking through what I can do to start on a good footing. I made a list of skills that I felt I needed to be proficient in and tried to read up my first rotation, Obstetrics, from books that i owned. I also searched online for tips from survivors of intern year, PGY-2's and 3's. Out of the articles that I have panned through I liked this one the best: "Ten tips for successfully completing your internship".

If things work out smoothly I will try to draft an intern survival guide of my own. However, for now I must go through it myself. 6 more days...

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Three things that helped me match!


After going through the match 2 times I felt like I had a good handle on what to do for this match process. In addition to making sure that my application was worked on diligently I did a few things that I believe helped me fare better in this match compared to the other two times.

The first thing I focused on was to take the step 3. This was an important step to let the residency program know that, while I had failed the step 2 CS, I was fully capable of passing any other exam. I studied very hard for this exam and I am happy I did so. It was one of the hardest tests I’ve taken till now. I knew that failing that test would make it even harder for me to go on. If you are interested in how I studied it’s on here somewhere.

The second thing that I did was to go to a family medicine conference. Each specialty has a conference where you can rub elbows with residents, sometimes program coordinators and if you are lucky program directors. I visited numerous booths, and talked to as many residents/pc’s/pd’s as I could. I also met some good people that I kept in contact with afterward. These people from different schools became my study partners, my interview practice partners etc. Additionally, and more along the lines of what I’m sure you want to hear, I interviewed at 2 of the programs that I met at the conference.  

The third thing that I did was contact programs. My sole purpose here was to let them know of my interest in them.

Following these 3 steps I was able to get more interviews than I got last year, and as a result I was able to match. Of course, I want to remind you that these are just supplementary things. If your personal statement is crap, your LOR’s say nothing good about you, your application is fraught with grammatical errors these supplemental things will not help you.


Now, its time for bed so that I can wake up bright and early for the first day of orientation at my residency program.