advice plzz

[me_myself]

---

Members do not see this ad.

Hi .
I am an IMG interested in psychiatry.
I am a green card holder.
My step 1 is on 30th june.
I got an opportunity to work as a volunteer research assistant in a very good university( among top 10 psych programs in US).How ever , work is going to be hectic. and I get time to study for step 2 only in the evenings and weekends .
On the other hand, a professor at a smaller university said I can assist him in his research work for 2-3 days a week. This gives me lots of time to prepare for my step 2 . But as I said he s a smaller clinician in a much smaller univ.
i am unable to decide.
Is it better to have a good LOR from a bigger univ and solid research ...or to have a better step 2 score with a not-so-recognizable LOR?
I am planning to take my step 2 CK in sept end/oct beginning.
i passed step 2 CS.
any advice vitriol,psydoc or any experienced soul?...any help highly appreciated.

 

[Adam_K]

I am an IMG interested in psychiatry.
Is it better to have a good LOR from a bigger univ and solid research ...or to have a better step 2 score with a not-so-recognizable LOR?
I am planning to take my step 2 CK in sept end/oct beginning.
i passed step 2 CS.

Others may disagree, but my advice is to go for the highest scores for both Step 1 and Step 2 CK and get your ECFMG certificate as early as possible in the application process.

You have to get past the ERAS filters and a "better" LoR is not necessarily going to help you do that, while good scores and an ECFMG certificate will.

 

[PsychMD2100]

Agree with Adam K

Letters often don't get read until the interview round. You need raw numbers to get the interviews.

Some programs expect equal or higher USMLEs from IMGs when they grant interviews.

 

[whopper]

I think you better budget the time you do into research carefully.

I did research for a particular doc at NYMC that I'm not going to name. The guy made me bend over backwards, doing a lot of work. I was doing about 40 hrs of work for the guy a day when he originally promised I'd only be doing 20. Then when I was doing 40 and I told him this was over the 20 he promised he freaked and complained that I wasn't dedicated enough.

So I gave in and gave him 40 even though I was only getting paid less than minimum wage for 20.

Then when the project actually turned in some results, the guy pushed my name off the author's list and put in attendings, some of whom had only put in about 5 hrs total into the project and I put in about 500. The guy verbally promised me I'd be an author and that was the only reason why I endured his abuse. The guy and these idiot attendings a few times even talked about me behind my back a few times because I wanted to go into psychiatry--they felt it was a BS field.

Then on top of that, it seemed that none of the programs that interviewed me cared about the research I did. They seemed to care most about my letters of reccomendations & my passion for psychiatry.

That research, although it did help me to learn about research did little to help me get in anywhere and I was very much exploited, IMHO, unethically by that doctor. I bent over backwards for him and that research didn't help me get in anywhere, and it very much hurt the time I had to put into studying to get a better MCAT score. Further, this is the case with several research assistents I've seen who are working in post grad, trying to get into a medschool.

So many research people I've seen worked crazy hrs for free or peanuts and when they got an interview, no one seemed to care about the research they did. They only seemed to care about letters of rec and grades.

One guy I knew in the graduate program at NYMC--he had gotten into a few DO schools and spent 2 years in the graduate program, doing 40 hrs of research a week, hoping it'd spruce up his CV to get into an MD school.

2 years, a masters, and several published projects later, and tens of thousands more in debt, he still couldn't get into an MD school and now was accepted into even fewer DO schools.

If both of us could've done it over again, we wouldn't have done any research, and just spent that time studying. They cared about our grades and exam scores much more, and that damn research might've only helped us a bit and we spent hundreds of hours doing that.