Does being trilingual help with matching

[OBfan]

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hope everyone is having a great night. I had a great experience at the hospital today. We had a new admission in the hospital today unfortunately for the patient she only spoke spanish fortunately for me I was the only one who spoke spanish. I was shoked that none of the residents or attendings new a word of spanish. One of the residents told me that it is a huge plus if you are fluent in another language.

I also speak fluent portuguese as well. Is it possible that being able to speak three languages fluently (english being your best) something that would help me get into a program even with a low step 1 score(185/74).

If any of you know of any programs that really hold weight to being trilingual I would really be grateful if you would list them in your responces.

by the way the lady eyes that we admitted lit up when someone could finally understand what she was saying.

THanks!

 

[atsai3]

hope everyone is having a great night. I had a great experience at the hospital today. We had a new admission in the hospital today unfortunately for the patient she only spoke spanish fortunately for me I was the only one who spoke spanish. I was shoked that none of the residents or attendings new a word of spanish. One of the residents told me that it is a huge plus if you are fluent in another language.

I also speak fluent portuguese as well. Is it possible that being able to speak three languages fluently (english being your best) something that would help me get into a program even with a low step 1 score(185/74).

If any of you know of any programs that really hold weight to being trilingual I would really be grateful if you would list them in your responces.

by the way the lady eyes that we admitted lit up when someone could finally understand what she was saying.

THanks!

True: All else equal, having additional non-English language fluency is a positive factor in your residency application.

-AT.

 

[la_tortuga]

Although I haven't heard of any myself, I would just not want to go to a residency program that viewed being tri-lingual as a negative rather then a plus. The idea that having three languages stuffed inside your brain impedes your ability to incorporate new ideas is antiquated. If anything, being tri-lingual makes you smarter! Good luck. . . and if you learn another language, you'll be quadlingual.

 

[Anasazi23]

There is a heated debate on the general residency forum about this topic.

I must say that quite often, I'm very happy that I am a monolingual English speaker. While being forced to find a translator on cases where I'm assigned a Spanish speaker can be tedious (the phone translator doesn't translate so well to psychiatry I find), it does dictate your outpatient case load profile to a great degree.

This is probably much less of an issue in rural areas, but in a large city, it can mean the difference between an English-speaking caseload versus 50-75% Spanish speaking caseload, since primary Spanish speakers make up a large portion of city clinics.

Not that this is inherently bad, but your opportunities to see and do therapy, if that's what you like, are then limited. A couple of our residents are from Spanish speaking countries, and have subsequently been assigned an 80% Spanish speaking caseload....even they're not happy. They argue that they're seeing the same general template patient the majority of the day

Further still, we have attendings who speak Spanish...but it is clearly not their first language. You can see they learned it on vacation or picked it up in class. They also struggle with various types of Spanish accents, jargon, etc. Also not an optimal situation.

In this situation, I feel that I'm better off knowing no Spanish than knowing enough to get by.

This will depend, too, on how and where you intend to practice when you get done with residency. i.e. if your plan is upper class private practice, then a huge Spanish speaking caseload in inner city clinic is not optimal for you.

All this said, it is a plus to be fluent or knowledgable in various languages on a residency application...for the reasons I outline above.

I'm wondering how other bilingual or better Spanish speakers would feel about being in a similar situation.