“So, have you figured out what you want to do with your life yet?”
I was eating lunch with my general surgery attending in the hospital cafeteria. Watching in disbelief as he drenched his burrito with a reckless amount of Tabasco.
“I’m not really sure, just trying to keep an open mind.” I lied, but everyone does.
“Well, regardless of what you choose, do your homework on the programs you apply to. It takes a lot more time than you think, and its good to know what you’re signing up for.”
This turned out to be really solid advice.
I ended up researching programs for three different specialties. First for orthopedic surgery, then I changed my mind and researched radiology programs…and then finally I had to repeat the process for transitional and preliminary positions.
I kept a spreadsheet with the info that was most important to me for quick comparisons. I have a family, a severe aversion to traffic, and no money, so, I focused on affordable, family-friendly locations first and foremost. I also kept track of things like salary, average hours worked per week, class size, moonlighting opportunities, call schedule, fellowship programs, average rental price, home sale prices, population, crime ratings etc. For my transitional year spreadsheet, I also included the specific # of required medicine rotations. Another of my severe aversions.
Everyone’s residency priorities will look a little different because we all value different things. After you decide what you care about, the real work begins. Here’s an overview of each resource I used for data gathering.
AMA Freida
- Have to be an AMA member ($20 for one year for med students), but you can try it for free for 10 programs
- Provides an account dashboard where you can save all the programs you like with a single click and keep notes about each one
- My dashboard data did get corrupted half-way through the season, and I lost all my notes. Hence the Excel spreadsheet.
- Map function if you want geography to be your guide
- Advanced filter options that allow you to narrow your search by selecting specific criteria you care about
- First year salary
- Residency size
- Avg hours worked (submitted by the program so may or may not be totally accurate)
- For example, my TY program is listed as 60 hours per week average, but I only hit that while on ICU and night float. And only a few times (less than 5 total).
- %USMD, IMG, DO in the program
- Gives an overview of each program’s work schedule, benefits, unique perks
- Contact information for the Program Coordinators and Program Directors
- Info on work schedules, call, and whether moonlighting is allowed
This is what it looks like.
Doximity Residency Navigator
- Free! You may or may not have to make an account and verify it. It’s really simple. Just send a pic of your student ID or enter an institutional email and confirm it that way.
- I would get your account verified so you can use the Doximity Dialer, it’s awesome for calling patient families for updates
- Allows you to sort by “reputation” so you can get a sense of which programs are highly regarded
- Reputation is decided by sending surveys to board certified attendings in each specialty and asking them to nominate up to 5 programs they think provide the best clinical training
- Map function that works well
- Less information provided on each program than FREIDA, but it’s free and allows you to save programs to a list and keep private notes about each one
- Shows a breakdown of the fellowships that residents do after graduating
- Has reviews from current and past residents
- Timeline of how many months you spend at each institution if you rotate at multiple hospitals
- Has a “couples match” feature that will allow you to search for two separate specialties side by side and see the distance between them
AAMC Residency Explorer Tool
- Free! You just have to make an AAMC account and maybe a Residency Explorer Tool account
- No map function, but you can set search filters by state
- Fill out your profile and load in all your stats to see how you compare to the current residents
- Can help you identify where the most competitive residents end up
- Helps you further stratify the high, middle, and low tier programs
- Gives you a sense of how competitive you are
- Allows for side-by-side comparison of a bunch of different residencies
- You can customize the data you want included in the comparison
- It’s similar to the info you find on FREIDA with a few extra categories
- Will generate an Excel spreadsheet with all the comparisons you care about
- This is awesome. It can save you a bunch of time filtering through FREIDA for the basic info you want to collect and then you can just add rows to the sheet for other info you want to compare
- You can also just explore residencies 1 by 1 and see all the information they have on file. It’s a lot.
Texas STAR data
- This is an awesome collection of data that takes a lot of the guesswork and mystery out of the match process.
- If your school contributes data to the program, then it’s a free resource. You can’t use it if your school doesn’t participate though. Your medical school will have to set you up with access.
- Data compiled from recently matched medical students for the past few years. It includes information about:
- How many programs (and which ones) medical students of varying caliber applied to
- How many interview invites they received (and which ones), and which programs they eventually matched to.
- When they started seeing interview invites rolling in.
- Includes the stats of said medical students (board scores, research publications, volunteer experiences, etc.)
- Advice from recently matched students (grain of salt required here, but I thought it was helpful)
- Students can see how people with similar stats faired in the match during previous years.
- Gives lots of practical information like the costs associated with application fees, interview costs, or other information.
Residency Websites
This is the final place I would look for any other information I cared about that I couldn’t find in the resources above. You can typically find the following:
- Call schedules
- Health insurance plan information
- Moonlighting opportunities
- Find the fine print about who can do it; follow-up with residents about competition for this type of thing and if they need to buy their own malpractice insurance or get a full license
- Fellowships available within the institution
- Fellowship placements of recent grads
- For preliminary programs: # of electives, # of required ICU, inpatient IM, and surgery rotations
If you can’t find any of this extra information, then you have a good list to draw from when creating your intelligent questions.
Other Helpful Tools
Reddit spreadsheets
- There always seems to be one of these floating around at the beginning of each application cycle
- Sometimes it has good insider information, but also contains a fair amount of hearsay and gossip
- Not guaranteed to be available (or useful) for every specialty
- Compare two cities’ cost of living plus information on schools, quality of life, and demographics
- Allows you to search crime rate in certain neighborhoods using an interactive map
- You can flip through various types of crime.
- Gives you a crime grade for each neighborhood.
- Will help you figure out how sketchy it might be near the hospital and which neighborhoods you’d want to find housing in.
Zillow for specific cities to find a representative sample of the price of rent/home sale price
Redfin is another intuitive real estate website to explore homes for sale
