Generic/Dual LORs for Med-Peds & IM a bad thing???

[fallen rock]

I was planning on applying to med-peds and medicine (only medicine programs that don't have med-peds)... and I have found that some medicine programs also require an IM chairman's letter like med-peds. Since they can only post one letter, it looks like the IM chairman's letter will end up being either 'generic' or mention 'this student would be great for med peds or medicine'... will a generic/dual statement like that from IM chairman (or one of your medicine LOR writers) make you look unfavorably to med peds people? Also now it will be obvious that you may be applying to other medicine progams as well even though it may not be at the same program.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm applying this year.

Med peds is my passion, but I'm trying my best to stay in the state due to family reasons. That's why I thought I'd expand my chances in my state by applying to both. Now I'm not sure though.

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[.edu-MD]

On many of my interviews, it was transparent that assessing commitment to Med/Peds was a high priority. Maybe your chair can help somehow in how the LOR is worded?

 

[hippiedoc13]

I had a somewhat similar situation: I applied to FM-psych combined programs, as well as regular FM programs. I had similar concerns, worrying that if I used generically-worded LORs for both types of programs I wouldn't appear committed enough to combined training, but that if all my letters mentioned combined training, that the straight FM programs might think FM was just my 'backup' and thus not seriously consider me.

What I did was use 3 generically-worded LORs for all my programs, and then I got an extra letter from my away rotation at a FM-psych program, and added it as a 4th letter just for my combined program apps. It worked out really well for me.

The other thing you can do, if you are really comfortable with your letter-writers, is actually ask them to do 2 slightly different versions of your LOR, one which says "will be great for med-peds" and another which says "will be great for medicine." It may not be possible to ask for that for your chairman's letter, so I'd probably just have the chairman's letter say "medicine." You can upload as many letters as you want to ERAS, the only limit is that you can only assign 4 letters to any given program. So you could theoretically upload 2 versions of every letter, and choose which ones to assign to which program. This requires some coordination with the person at your school who scans the letters, so that you make sure the scanned letters are properly labeled so you can correctly assign them.