C&A application advice

Started by rgerwin
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rgerwin

rgerwin

Senior Member
15+ Year Member
I am considering a C&A fellowship. Our program has most of it's child exposure beginning 3rd year, but we get a good deal of 16+ adolescents. My question is in application timing. I have no idea what is needed for a competitive application as far as experience goes, and would it better to wait until after 4th year? Or does it not matter and I can choose after 3rd or 4th year? Thoughts?
 
rgerwin said:
I am considering a C&A fellowship. Our program has most of it's child exposure beginning 3rd year, but we get a good deal of 16+ adolescents. My question is in application timing. I have no idea what is needed for a competitive application as far as experience goes, and would it better to wait until after 4th year? Or does it not matter and I can choose after 3rd or 4th year? Thoughts?
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Totally not applying in C&A, but we don't get any exposure to child psych until 3rd year. As far as I know, no one here has had problems fast tracking.
 
I do question the wisdom of waiting until 3rd year to expose residents to child psych (since lots of us had the experience of liking a specialty in theory but then hating it when we saw what it was like in reality during MS3) but it seems to be a pretty common situation. Child psych is really not competitive over all. At my program the child psych dept was heavily campaigning for those of us who had expressed any slight interest to go into the child fellowship here because they have not been getting as many qualified applicants as they'd like (the child program here isn't one of the elite ones, but I'd say more middle of the road, certainly not the bottom of the barrel).
The only reason I think you would *have* to do a 4th year would be if you really wanted to be chief or if you have some kind of special interest that getting some elective time to explore would be helpful for.
For your own sake, it would probably be good to try to get some extra exposure to the child psych dept as a PGY 2 just to make sure it is indeed what you want to do.
 
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Hi,

If it's possible I'd recommend trying to see if you can get early exposure to child psych in 2nd year, mainly for your sake. Unless you're 100% sure you want to do child psych, it would be very helpful in your decision process. It would also help in the interview process to have a more informed decision. However, if you can't make that happen, I don't think it should necessarily prevent you from applying in 3rd year. Other then a few exceptions, you shouldn't have any trouble matching into a child fellowship either way. I wouldn't hold off applying to the fellowship until your a 4th year unless you need the time to decide it's right for you. Keep in mind that child psych is not for everyone. I personally enjoy it much more then working with adults (other then schizophrenics...one adult group I can work with), but working with the parents can be very difficult.
 
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