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Residency interview season is here, and…
Date Recorded
November 06, 2015 Transcription
Interviewer: Congratulations. You're a fourth-year medical student who's just secured an internal medicine residency interview, but how are you going to make yourself stand out in a sea of qualified candidates?
Find out next on The Scope.
Announcer: Navigating your way through med school can be tough. Wouldn't it be great if you had a mentor to help you out? Well, whether you're first year or fourth year, we've got you covered. The Med Student Mentor is on The Scope.
Interviewer: So residency interview season is here and to help you prepare for success, we have Dr. Caroline Milne, the residency program director for internal medicine at the University of Utah, and today she'll talk to us about how to launch yourself to the top of a program's applicant list with your interview. So Dr. Milne, name three attributes of a stellar, must-have residency applicant.
Dr. Milne: I think that the first attribute would be a passion for something. I have a very large training program. We are definitely not looking for one particular type of person. We'll match about 55 residences here so, obviously they're a very diverse group of people. But most people do want to see a passion for something and it could be anything. It could be some community service organization. It could be research. It could be almost anything, but a true passion for something. So that would be one.
Two, I would be remiss if I didn't say that past performance is very important. People that have excelled throughout their early careers we think will predict success in later portions of training. If there's been something on your record that you're not delighted with there are ways to work around that, but every program director is looking for the highest performing applicant.
Three, would be people skills, which definitely include being able to work within a team. Medicine is now very, very much team based and we want to see people that have been very professional and have good communication skills because we think that predicts success in a clinical specialty like ours, which is internal medicine.
Interviewer: Right, and you can definitely demonstrate those communication skills during an interview, too.
Dr. Milne: Yes, you can.
Interviewer: Okay. You always hear that, on average, interviewers establish their opinions on an interview candidate within the first few minutes of the interview. So what can an internal medicine residency candidate do to make sure that the first few minutes of their interview are a success?
Dr. Milne: I think it's great to be unique. I don't think you want to be terribly unique. Appearance is important and you never know who your audience is going to be and what they're going to think of your level of uniqueness.
So maybe the interview is not the time to reveal something that some people might find unprofessional, whether it's unprofessional or not to the general public. I think that a conservative approach to appearance is definitely important and, for good or for bad, that's just the way it is and there are lots of studies that have looked at that.
I also think some sort of confidence with humility. You don't want to appear overly confident but you certainly don't want to appear under confident and you want to display some degree of humility. And interest. You definitely want to be interested in being where you are.
Interviewer: Okay. What do you think medical students struggle with most during an interview and are there any ways we can avoid this pitfall?
Dr. Milne: I think you need to make sure you know everything that's on your CV. It's surprising to me how many times I've picked up something that's on somebody's CV that it becomes very obvious within seconds that they know nothing about what they've written. It may have been a research project that they worked on in undergrad or the fact that they love basset hounds.
You never know what I'm going to ask you or what the interviewer is going to ask you but, whatever you have on your written application, you need to make sure you know the depth. Do not say you love Russian literature because you don't know if the person in front of you has a Ph.D. in Russian literature if you truly don't love Russian literature.
That's what I like to tell people that I'm mentoring as they're going into their fourth year is don't put anything on your CV that you're not very comfortable talking about extensively.
You can go through an entire interview season and people might not ask you about it but there might be somebody that asks you about something. You say you speak advanced Spanish and they start speaking Spanish to you and you really only speak beginner Spanish. That's a mistake.
Interviewer: That's some solid advice.
You were saying how you like to see interview candidates who are passionate. Is there such a thing as an interview candidate who is too enthusiastic?
Dr. Milne: I think so, but I think that experienced interviewers can tell if that's just somebody that's nervous. I would definitely rather see somebody that's overly enthusiastic than somebody that's under enthusiastic because if you in any way appear bored and, believe it or not, there are people that will yawn during interviews, you almost can't believe it. That actually may be a sign of nerves as well.
Even if it isn't a place that you want to be or you've decided already that this is some place that isn't going to work out for you, I think you want to represent yourself and the university that you're from in such a way that later people will speak highly of both of those things if it would ever cross their path again.
Announcer: TheScopeRadio.com is University of Utah Health Sciences Radio. If you like what you heard, be sure to get our latest content by following us on Facebook. Just click the on the Facebook icon at TheScopeRadio.com.
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What do chief residents do and what are their…
Date Recorded
February 20, 2015 Science Topics
Medical Education Transcription
Interviewer: So you've all heard of chief residents, but what do you really know about them? What do they do, and what's their role in the medical team? And how do you decide if you want to be one? Find out next on The Scope.
Announcer: Navigating your way through med school can be tough. Wouldn't it be great if you had a mentor to help you out? Well, whether you're first year or fourth year, we've got you covered. The Med Student Mentor is on The Scope.
Interviewer: So you're considering becoming chief resident, but you're not sure if it's the right fit for you. To tell you more about the role and benefits of a chief resident, we have Dr. Caroline Milne who is currently who is the residency program director for internal medicine at the University of Utah. She was also a chief resident during her last year of training here. Dr. Milne, what is a chief resident?
Dr. Milne: A chief resident is different depending on specialties. Internal medicine is quite unique in that the chief resident is an extra year of training. In most other training specialties, the chief resident is the resident that is in their last year of training. So you are automatically a chief resident if, say, you are in your fifth year of general surgery training. Nationally, being chosen to be a chief medical resident in internal medicine is considered to be a great honor. Usually the best and the brightest people that have the support of their peers and the faculty, and most of the time, people that are thinking about careers in academia.
Interviewer: What responsibilities and duties do chief residents have that other residents don't have?
Dr. Milne: When I describe the chief resident's year to people that are considering the year, I describe it as a junior faculty year. It's definitively a year when you're bridged between residency, where we feel like you know the needs of the resident better than most faculty members, but also you're considering, in greater detail, the need of a department and the hospital in ways that residents really aren't taking into consideration those roles.
Interviewer: I guess we're all kind of wondering, is being a chief resident a huge time commitment?
Dr. Milne: I think it depends on who you ask. If you ask the chief residents, they would say yes. If you ask a busy young faculty member, they would say no. It's a really nice year, different than residency in that you're not really assigned shifts of work. So coming out of residency in a specialty like internal medicine, you're used to working overnights and longer shifts, and the chiefs here don't have as much clinical responsibility. But administration is time consuming in its own way.
Most of the chief residents that I've had over the last 12 years would tell me that the role that they found most interesting, and also the role that they disliked the most, is, unfortunately, dealing with different personalities and different people. Because I recently read that there's no leader that's liked by everybody, and certainly a chief resident is that person. I have 120 residents in my training program. You cannot make 120 residents happy. A part of the troubles and the struggles in the chief residency is learning how to appropriately deal with people.
Interviewer: Right, definitely a lot of people skills and leadership skills that you develop during that year.
Dr. Milne: Correct.
Interviewer: Okay, so how do you think being a chief resident enhanced your career?
Dr. Milne: Well, I would say actually a program director is a glorified, long-standing chief resident. I have a few more responsibilities, but my role is just ongoing, the same roles that I picked up as a chief resident. As you pointed out, leadership is really important. And prioritizing things that you want to or should be accomplished in the year become a really important skill set that you have. People skills, very, very important. Learning how to diplomatically deal with people when you're telling them an answer they don't want to hear. Learning how to keep morals high in times that it's difficult to do so, and that's what I do now.
Time management is important too. Teaching time management skills, because one of the big roles of the chief resident is to mentor any people that are struggling in their training. And then, of course, teaching is a huge role because, in our program, the chief resident has the major job of teaching at all of our morning report conferences.
Interviewer: For those of us that who still medical students, what could we do, as a first year resident, to prepare ourselves to eventually become a chief resident?
Dr. Milne: You do have to be the highest quality physician in your group, because to be a chief resident, and to gain the respect of your peers, first and foremost, you have to be a highly competent physician. You have to have been a team player all during residency. That means taking more than their share of the workload. Never letting people think that they're actually trying to give other people the rougher end of the stick, instead of taking it for their own.
So there's lots of little things that people do, early on, and I don't think they are actually vying to be the chief resident, but are just really natural characteristics that are obvious that, "Oh, those are the people that are going to lead this training program someday."
Announcer: TheScopeRadio.com is University of Utah Health Sciences Radio. If you like what you heard, be sure to get our latest content by following us on Facebook. Just click on the Facebook icon at TheScopeRadio.com.
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