Average MS2 interested in IM/cardiology

[CardiB]

---

Members don't see this ad.

I am an MS2 at a mid-tier state school with a P/F preclinical curriculum. Thus far, I've passed all my required courses and now am preparing for Step 1.

I have not done any extracurriculars, except for being an anatomy TA for the MS1s.

I did not realize how much I really liked cardiology until I started learning about it in second year and after shadowing both interventional and non-interventional cardiologists. I realize that cardiology is my passion and I would like to pursue this further.

I have not done much research on IM programs and how they decide what fellowship you're able to pursue, as I was interested in EM originally. I am from NYC and I would ultimately like to return to do my residency and fellowship here. My dream is NY Presbyterian-Cornell program for residency, but it is not the end all be all for me.

My questions are:
1) What residency programs are historically strong for matching their students into cardiology fellowships?

2) For said residency programs, what is their average Step 1 score? (I tried looking this up on FRIEDA but a lot of the NYC programs didn't report this)

3) Should I do a IM/cardiology away rotation? How do these work exactly?

I tried looking up this information on my own and I could not find these answers.

Thanks!

 

[Redpancreas]

A medical student with an interest in Cardiology who wants to live in NYC. Never heard that before...🙄.

All top 40-50 IM residencies on Doximity should grant you a good opportunity to pursue a respectable fellowship if you work hard. FREIDA is unreliable. For NYP, you could probably pass the filter with only a bit above average 240+ but that’s the good news. The bad news is there’s a lot more involved with securing a top 20 IM residency including AOA, geographical preference, subjective 3rd year grades, what demographics the program is trying to fill, what looks good on an resident profile page (sorry DOs) and research. You can do an away but for Internal Medicine, they’re generally discouraged because it’s a large field and it doesn’t really work like EM/Surgical fields where your aways are like auditions. It’s more of a chance to do a subspecialty elective (like Cardiology) and get a LOR from a name in the field. All these answers are not 100% accurate, but I bet my guess is as good as anyone’s.

Now with all that said, relax. I believe if Cards is what you really want and you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get it, you will ultimately succeed given your academic record so far. Dedicate all your efforts to Step 1 with no exceptions. Afterwards, try to spend a little time during M3 trying to get some Cardiology research (or anything really for that matter). There are benefits to landing a top-20 program in that the name recognition alone will bolster your fellowship application significantly. That being said, people from upper-middle and mid tier university programs still can match well as long as they work hard, get research, and are a solid resident and people from lower tier places still match Cards but probably mostly at their home institution or lesser known places.