So what Step scores does a Caribbean grad (from one of the better known schools, if that makes any difference) need to land a middle tier psychiatry residency?
The school can make a difference. Some foreign schools have developed far better reps than others, and I have seen several residency programs take note of that.
What step score? At least in my own program, I have not seen too much emphasis on the actual score. Several of our program's best residents didn't have USMLE scores that correlated with their performance. A good USMLE score is definitely a good thing, but if the score was not that good (barely above passing for example) I wouldn't hold it against an applicant if they didn't fail it too many times & the rest of their application was solid.
I would start holding USMLE performance against an applicant if they failed multiple times--I'm talking 3 or more.
I would also hold a low USMLE score or past failures against a candidate if that person had not yet taken Step II, which was the case for some of our applicants. Reason why is past scores are a predictor for future scores. We had an unfortunate situation where someone got into our program, and his Step II score was still pending, and by the time we finally got it, turned out he failed. He had to be removed and it left us a resident short.
For that reason, anyone who had not yet taken Step II and has a Step I score on the lower side is at somewhat of a risk for failing Step II. We wouldn't want to accept a resident, only to find they can't legally practice as a resident in July.
This is of course in regards to my own program. We're not the most competitive out there but we are decent. As you go up in competition expect the standards to be higher.
Several of the higher tier programs will not even consider a foreign grad for residency, but this often times will not hurt when applying to fellowship.
Does anyone mind sharing how many programs they applied to/how many interviews they received and their scores?
My own USMLE scores weren't great. Forgot the number of programs I applied to but they were all in the NY/PA/NJ area. Got about 10 interviews, and I am a foreign grad.
If you do not want to post your scores, I would appreciate a pm. I will have a fairly long standing, demonstrated interest in psych and a research project. US citizen. How can I make myself more competitive other than grades/LoRs?
Your personal statement better state why you're interested in psychiatry. In my own program any application that didn't have this was pretty much not considered (very few exceptions).
I'd get at least 1-2 LORs from a psychiatry attending. When you do your rotation, try to spot from the beginning a good attending you can work with & develop a good mentor relationship. When I did my medstudent rotation, on day 1 I told the attending I wanted to go into the field and asked him to throw anything at me that would get me a good LOR & training. The guy really appreciated my enthusiasm, wrote me a kick butt letter and had me doing some extra projects. The guy told me I was doing better than some of the residents, but he only took the time & effort to go that level because I told him upfront what I wanted out of the rotation.
I would consider doing some psyche electives, but definitely do electives in non-psyche areas that are useful in psychiatry such as primary care, Neurology, Endocrinology, Gastroenterology. All of those fields heavily interact with Psychiatry.
If you try to do rotations at places where you want to do residency this can help you out if they have a good impression of you.
Does anyone know of any Psychiatry organizations that Carib students can join?
You can join the APA.
Some other tidbits I looked for.....
-Anything, I mean anything that showed enthusiasm for this field. We had enough applicants who didn't like psychiatry who were applying into it as a "safety".
-good leadership skills. These correlate with good people skills. Psychiatrists are often the leaders in treatment teams on inpatient units. Another thing is becuase psychiatry residencies are smaller than other fields such as IM, the program has a much smaller pool to pick from in choosing their chief resident. Think of it this way--when a program has over 10 residents per class--there's probably going to be at least 1 that can manage the group that's a good pick for chief. When there's only about 3-6 per class, there's about a 50% likelihood one of them can be a good chief.
I'm not 100% certain about this but I think my own experience in this area helped me out big time. I was on the executive board for a number of student groups, drafted constitutions, voted on critical issues (such as kicking a medstudent out of the school for violent behavior) and ran a few successful businesses, one of which had over 100 employees working under me. These were brought up during my interviews & it seemed to help.
-good communciation-Speech, poise, good feeling of connection was strongly considered. This was a make or break during our interview process.
-we wanted people to be enthusiastic, but some people really came off looking fake. Don't overdo it. Be "real" (yeah I know its hard to do, especially in a high anxiety situation).
