Appyling to Neuro and prelim IM

[piggaloo]

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Dear all,

I just wanted to post a few of my questions I'm having a hard time getting answers to from other people. I would really appreciate it if some of you who have been through the application process recently could take a stab at these as time permits. At the moment, my most pressing question is about the choice of preliminary medicine spots to apply for. The rest are listed in order of priority below. As always, thanks in advance for your help.

1) Preliminary year: Where all did you apply for your internship? How many programs is reasonable? How many is too many? Did you build a separate supplementary list of preliminary medicine spots for each neurology program on your primary rank order list (to end up in the same city for all four years of your training), or did you just assume that you were going to have to move twice unless you matched into an integrated program?

2) LORs: How many letters did you have from neurology faculty? For the preliminary medicine year, how many letters from internal medicine faculty? Did you get letters from faculty members who were not in either department? On a somewhat related note, should I totally gun my medicine sub-I? Did any of you shoot for a letter from that attending?

3) Contacting programs: When in the application process did you start contacting programs for information? What kind of information did you contact them for? LORs? Application deadlines? Number of spots? I've read in a few places that I'm supposed to be contacting programs for application materials soon, but what's the point of ERAS if you have to contact each program under separate cover?

Thanks again for any feedback you can provide.

 

[llogg]

1. No one can tell you how many programs to apply to would be reasonable for you. It all depends on how competitive an applicant you are and what type of programs you want to go to. As for the rank list question, that will be clear when you actually do the lists in ERAS. You will have Neurology as your primary match list and for each program on that list that requires a separate prelim spot you will make a supplemental list of prelim programs. Those lists can be different for each neuro program, so that if geography is very important to you you can rank the prelim spots in order of proximity to the associated neuro program.

2. LORs: I had zero LORs from neurologists, but I would not recommend that. It was simply a quirk of the scheduling and rotations at my school that led to that. More important than what department the letter writer is in is what kind of letter they write.

3. Contact programs that you have a strong interest in, especially if they are competitive. The more times they see your name the better. (Even if it's just the program coordinator.)