Your friend considers programs that have DOs as red flags?
Any program that isn’t FM or peds (and I guess now EM) that has a ton of DOs probably has a hard time recruiting applicants. We’re only like 20% of the applicant pool, so having 80% DOs should raise an eyebrow.
Thanks! Dumb question but what would be a green flag ratio in terms of mds to dos?
Yeah they don’t want to rub shoulders with peasants (like me). Their mentality is if you *need to drop that low how good could you possibly be. All state school MD co-residents or bust. Given they’re just one med student but they aren’t even the ****tiest person I know and I’ve heard the same mentality on sub-Is. Like literally had an attending who would ask residents if they were a DO when they made a basic mistake.
It isn’t the people that hate on DOs are dumb. Considering we can’t know what the individual people did to get into residency it’s hard to know if that program had a *good match. It’s also a very hard question to answer because specialties vary in how much they care about prestige. FM is way more likely than surgery to not consider how prestigious their hires are.
Probably a roughly equal amount relative to the percentage that apply to the specialty. I.e., if 20% of the applicant pool is DO to a certain field and the program takes 10 residents, about 2 per year on average makes sense, right? But if it’s 7 DOs and 3 IMGs and they’ve only had 1 USMD in the past 5 years, that means there’s something about the program that makes people not want to go there.
DO bias is still a thing, although improving. It will continue to improve, albeit slowly, as culture changes. Medicine has no lack of pedigree shaming or bullying. It is not just with DO's as MD's also do it to each other. I have seen it. If someone tells you within 30 seconds of meeting them that they went to xxx School or residency, they are one of them. Fortunately this number is not the majority. I have found that most of the great docs I know with extensive pedigrees don't talk about it at all. Sometimes you just can't take the PreMed out of the Doc.
You’re right getting into IM shouldn’t be too hard and getting into an academic program is less challenging than other fields but it is still an uphill battle. I’ve seen people do it at mid tier academic centers as DOs. They published, they got good board scores and honestly could have probably matched surgery. But really it comes down to the culture at the program and the bias that they allow in their ranking + luck in how they rank.
So what are considered legit connections then, are we talking strictly at the chief resident and PD level? I would think my two bff's at NYU IM would work; what more can you ask for lol. Also, how do you meet such connections if I'm stuck at a medical school location? I've heard conferences, but why would these higher-ups talk to a low-tier DO student like myself. Plus, aren't there hundreds of other med. students trying to get onto their radar; why would they remember speficially me? I hate to be dismal about it, but I'm just curious since I just don't know as a matriculating pre-med.
Who you know always matters, regardless of where you go to school.
SDN makes it seem like you won’t match GI or cards if you don’t go to a top 50 program. You can accomplish this goal by just training at just about any academic tertiary care center for IM.
I don’t know if they really changed our perception. I’ve seen kids from Burell ect end up at great programs. I think DOs have won respect on the clinical side but I’m not sure academia more so tolerates us when they feel like it.
