Fresh! Residency Match Data!

[The Unincredible]

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Hey Guys!

So the AAMC's Careers in Medicine site has some updated match data for Rad Onc...woooooo! Or not. I've attached the document to this post for all you beautiful peoples to see. Med students can find similar data for all specialties by logging on to CiM and selecting "Characteristics of Entering Residents".

Yeah, so I'm not gonna lie. My heart sunk when I saw these stats. I went and played the violin alone in my studio apt for a little while.

Do you guys think this data is legit? Mean number of distinct specialties applied to was 5? Mean number of abstracts, presentations, and pubs for matched candidates was 18.3?! I'm beginning my M3 year (after a year off!), and I might have a prayer of accomplishing the research track record of some of those outstanding candidates who didn't match.

The upside for some of us might be that step 1 doesn't seem to count for too much. The downside for some of us is the same...raw deal?

I'm going to go wash down a brownie ice cream sundae with some top-shelf vodka. Cheers!

 

[medgator]

"The upside for some of us might be that step 1 doesn't seem to count for too much. The downside for some of us is the same...raw deal"

I've always said that research and LORs trump a step I, and this data bears that out. You still need to get a reasonable step 1 though

 

[lhl]

This data is suspect. 258 US MD's who applied and did not enter the field? Does it include SOAP people or something? 30% of people going into rad onc applying to 6 or more specialties? Plus if you look at the distributions in the graphs they are no where near what would be expected (i.e. exactly 13% of people entering the specialty with 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 10, and more than 10 volunteer experiences each or a high percentage of people at seemingly random data points with zero people at other nearby data points).

To me it looks almost like survey data with an n of less than 10 is what we are seeing...other than perhaps for the step 1/2 data.

The extreme questionability of parts of this data makes the whole dataset very difficult to interpret, draw conclusions from, or use in any meaningful way. Either further explination needs to be given from those who compiled the data or med students/potential applicants should just throw this out and revert back to 2011 charting outcomes. Even the biased spreadsheet created here on SDN is more helpful than this publication.