Changing Residency

[moveon]

hi there i m currently finishing up my pgy1 in categorical IM. My program is extremely malignant and despite good evaluations they are not promoting me and have currently put me on probation. i did interview for a pgy2 spot at couple of places and am still looking for other openings. the attendings i have worked with in my current program are veyr supportive and are very ready to provide strong references. i desperately want to get out of my current program and save my career. i am an IMG and have reached this position with great difficulty. i dont want to lose my career because i crossed paths with some malignant people. they have been making me work harder and swapping my schedules to make me do more of icu but i dont see any benefit of all this as they put me on probation after signing a pgy2 contract and are making it extremely difficult for me currently. i just want to end playing these silly games (wish my pd and asso pd grew up and acted their age)....please please please email me if u guys know of any pg2 spots. i have been a very meritorious student back home and all attendings have praised my work, some of them who are still in touch were shocked tohear the treatment meted out to me by my current program.

also would it be advisable to switch specialties ? as a back up could i move to peds/ i was very good at peds during med school and still love the specialty. i am sure i would make a good peds resident. infact iwas in a dilemma between i m and peds while applying for residency.

please guide me appropriately, i am very frustrated by the current scenario and would like to get out of this helpless situation asap.

thanks a bunch!!!

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[peppy]

Sorry to hear you've been having such a hard time in your program.
Have you been given any indication of what their reason for not promoting you is exactly?
Unfortunately I don't know of any open positions to suggest. Have you looked for family medicine positions? If you like both IM and peds, it seems like that might be a good fit for you. Hope things work out for you soon.

 

[peerie]

Well, I don't know that I have any answers or anything since I am a new resident but I am a human being and do have some life experiences.

Here goes: it sounds like you are in a crunch. But, maybe not such a bad one. It sounds like you are in a challenging IM program (aren't most pretty hard?), and you might be overwhelmed. Ok, not the end of the world. But, maybe you are not doing what they want or learning as much/fast as they would like.

Being on probation is a big deal but I would take this as an opportunity, and I would get down on my knees and say my prayers tonight that I was being given probation and not the boot. I would ask my higher power to please give me the insight to understand what I am doing wrong and what I need to do to change my behavior. I would take a deep, hard look inside myself and ask what is preventing me from doing and being my best? and I don't mean from the faculty, but from myself.

It sounds to me that you are given an opportunity to hustle and maybe pick up a new mindset by being in the ICU. I mean, like tough love. Maybe Aprog can comment, but I would think that programs do not want to lose a resident and would rather that resident did whatever they could to gain the skills and abilities to be successful. They want you to do well and succeed.

A wake up call can be a second chance, if you decide to see it that way. Don't run away, see if you can learn from this.

 

[fgar]

hi there i m currently finishing up my pgy1 in categorical IM. My program is extremely malignant and despite good evaluations they are not promoting me and have currently put me on probation. i did interview for a pgy2 spot at couple of places and am still looking for other openings. the attendings i have worked with in my current program are veyr supportive and are very ready to provide strong references. i desperately want to get out of my current program and save my career. i am an IMG and have reached this position with great difficulty. i dont want to lose my career because i crossed paths with some malignant people. they have been making me work harder and swapping my schedules to make me do more of icu but i dont see any benefit of all this as they put me on probation after signing a pgy2 contract and are making it extremely difficult for me currently. i just want to end playing these silly games (wish my pd and asso pd grew up and acted their age)....please please please email me if u guys know of any pg2 spots. i have been a very meritorious student back home and all attendings have praised my work, some of them who are still in touch were shocked tohear the treatment meted out to me by my current program.

also would it be advisable to switch specialties ? as a back up could i move to peds/ i was very good at peds during med school and still love the specialty. i am sure i would make a good peds resident. infact iwas in a dilemma between i m and peds while applying for residency.

please guide me appropriately, i am very frustrated by the current scenario and would like to get out of this helpless situation asap.

thanks a bunch!!!

I am a Caribbean med student getting ready to apply for residency in the United States can I start with Internal Med. And transfer to General Surgery residency with in the same hospital program?

 

[bluealiendoctor]

fgar, I think you meant to start a new thread. If not, listen up..or more appropriately...read up:

This guy/girl is posting for help with his/her particular problem. For you to butt-in with your grammatically offensive post is just plain rude. If you don't have anything to offer the OP, then start a new thread with your question. Dig?

 

[fgar]

fgar, I think you meant to start a new thread. If not, listen up..or more appropriately...read up:

This guy/girl is posting for help with his/her particular problem. For you to butt-in with your grammatically offensive post is just plain rude. If you don't have anything to offer the OP, then start a new thread with your question. Dig?

Sorry new at this!

 

[Winged Scapula]

There is no need for users to be rude to each other.

No everyone is BB savvy.

 

[bluealiendoctor]

There is no need for users to be rude to each other.

No everyone is BB savvy.

Yeah, okay. Sorry about that 'long thoracic nerve injury', I was a bit hasty.

 

[dragonfly99]

original poster:
It sucks if you are in a malignant program, or one that is a bad fit, but IMHO (as a former medicine resident) you'll probably do better for yourself by staying in your current program than by trying to bail out. It's OK to look around and see if you can find a better position, but the likelihood of finding an open PGY2 IM spot at a place that you like, and being able to transfer there, is just not good. For one thing, every/any place that you interview is going to find out that you are on probation and that will make it hard for you to switch to any other program. If you can get yourself off probation and manage to finish your IM residency on time and graduate with your class, that would be the best outcome. If you do switch, it would probably be better to switch to peds or family practice and just start over,but that requires being an intern again, which would really suck.

Sometimes, you just have to deal with certain attendings (or a PD) who seems to be lying in wait for you to make some mistakes. That is just life, fair or unfair. You may or may not be better or worse than some other residents, but now your performance is under the microscope. From here on out you have to make sure you go in early, have all the labs/data on your patients, write good notes, take care of all paperwork (such as discharge summaries, clinic notes, etc.) on time and be REALLY nice to everyone. Also, don't bomb the in service exam...my program director told us when we started residency that this was not used for evaluation and promotion, but just as practice for the ABIM exam, but it was actually used to pick chief residents and to evaluate how "smart" people were. IM is not generally as blatant as the surgeons about how these types of exams are used, but they do tend to be used against people if/when the PD is looking for things to go after.

It's very tough to switch residencies, and as someone who is a FMG (I mean someone from a foreign school and who also needs a visa) I think it would be extra hard. Also would be hard as a US citizen IMG, but probably not as hard...

 

[DrJosephKim]

Sorry to hear that you're having such a difficult time. Perhaps you will do better in the same specialty, but a different program setting. It's a shame to hear that programs are still very malignant. You'd think that the work hour restrictions would have changed some of them.

 

[peerie]

Hello again,

I hope that the advice I offered was helpful; I mean, I meant it to be helpful and not in any way to be harsh or anything.

To be honest, I think it's not so much the work that is hard in residency altho it certainly is alot of work and learning. But, it is the politics and the personalities that can be the most difficult. Sometimes, they are very hard to understand and on top of a painful night on call in the ICU it can leave you feeling in despair. Maybe that's what I meant about trying to learn from it, to learn from all these experiences and to somehow come out stronger on the other end. All we can do is move forward, and you might as well learn the most from where you are. At least, that is what I would do. Residency is hard.

 

[docjaan2007]

I am in the same situation as you. My program was full of politics and I was simply forced to leave it because I couldn't take it anymore. However, now I'm in a bind because it's so tough to find another residency position. I'm looking desperatly to find a PGY2 position now. My advice is keep on going, you'll find something!

 

[bakanoisha]

... be REALLY nice to everyone...

I just wanted to mention that this means "smiling" while being nice Being polite without a smile is like not being polite at all. I noticed the OP said he's an IMG, so I figured I'd plug the fact that Americans love kind smiles... it's like kryptonite for the hard-hearted. I'm not kidding either. I can't tell you how beneficial it's been for me to be polite, kind, and give a smile--even in difficult situations, in all aspects of my life.

 

[benjee]

hi there i m currently finishing up my pgy1 in categorical IM. My program is extremely malignant and despite good evaluations they are not promoting me and have currently put me on probation. i did interview for a pgy2 spot at couple of places and am still looking for other openings. the attendings i have worked with in my current program are veyr supportive and are very ready to provide strong references. i desperately want to get out of my current program and save my career. i am an IMG and have reached this position with great difficulty. i dont want to lose my career because i crossed paths with some malignant people. they have been making me work harder and swapping my schedules to make me do more of icu but i dont see any benefit of all this as they put me on probation after signing a pgy2 contract and are making it extremely difficult for me currently. i just want to end playing these silly games (wish my pd and asso pd grew up and acted their age)....please please please email me if u guys know of any pg2 spots. i have been a very meritorious student back home and all attendings have praised my work, some of them who are still in touch were shocked tohear the treatment meted out to me by my current program.

also would it be advisable to switch specialties ? as a back up could i move to peds/ i was very good at peds during med school and still love the specialty. i am sure i would make a good peds resident. infact iwas in a dilemma between i m and peds while applying for residency.

please guide me appropriately, i am very frustrated by the current scenario and would like to get out of this helpless situation asap.

thanks a bunch!!!

sorry to hear what happened to you. I have seen especially IMGs, once they are on probation , they will be fired for sure. I would suggest resignation before they fired you and reapply a different specialty , that way, you can still explain why you left previous program and feel the new specialty can be a right path for you.meanwhile, collect all good evaluations which will serve as evidence that your performance was not totally a mess. when you get interview or write up your PS, BE HONEST of what happened and if there were mistakes you made, admit them and show the new program you learn your mistakes..etc.At this point , there is no use to try hard in coming off probation cuz the outcome has already been decided .

 

[buckley]

Sorry to hear that you're having such a difficult time. Perhaps you will do better in the same specialty, but a different program setting. It's a shame to hear that programs are still very malignant. You'd think that the work hour restrictions would have changed some of them.

What work hours restriction? 80-hour work week is a farce in some programs And you just get pissed off by having to lie in your ACGME forms every single month. It's like adding insult to injury....or shall we say extra work. The way my senior explained it to me is this: if u report your program, your program gets probation. and who suffers? the attendings?! of course not! it'll be the residents who now have to deal with being in a program who's on on probation...

 

[DrJosephKim]

Let's hope that spies from the ACGME aren't scanning these forums to identify programs that aren't following the rules (laws, actually).

 

[snowbank]

Moveon - looking back a year later - what happened? DId they allow you to continue, did you transfer to another program, or did you move to another specialty?

 

[Gabby]

,