What does it take to get into one of the top programs other than higher USMLE scores and some psych research?
- Be professional, compassionate, and motivated on all your clinical rotations. Honoring psych is kind of expected; top programs look at how you do clinically as a whole, not just your psych rotations.m AOA is helpful if you're an allopath.
- Get to know clinicians you work with and give them the chance to get to know you. Good LORs are big, and it helps if they are from people that are know to folks at the programs you want to attend (e.g.: a letter from a known county public health doc in the town of a program you're applying to will likely carry more weight than one from an academic cross country the target program doesn't know). It's also best to go to a school where you can work longitudinally so that your letters aren't limited to folks who've seen your work for only a month (e.g.: if you go DO, try to choose a program that has organized PGY-3/4 years, not ones that have you traveling from site to site in different hospitals for 2 years).
- Find your passion(s) and jump in during medical school. Are you interested in education? Try to write standardized patient cases or curriculum development, not just tutoring here and there. Are you interested in research? Make it a part of your life in med school. Doing lab work between MS1 and MS2 in the summer as a perfunctory box to check doesn't impress anyone, but playing a growing role in projects for years says something about your commitment to research. Are you interested in LGBT, public psychiatry, the justice-involved, veterans health, cross-cultural psych, psychosomatic, or women's health? Explore it with gusto in med school, take a big bite, show some passion that indicates follow through by actually doing work in the area so that you don't name a bunch of interests that you never really explored by the time you apply.
- Top programs get LOTS of apps and they can be choosy. That you are a good med student is a given. But what makes you DIFFERENT? How will you contribute to your residency by being a little different from your peers and help with a different perspective? What in your life experience before, during, or outside of medical school shows this? Does your application and the choices you've made in med school show that you're comfortable inside your own skin and willing to be yourself?
- High USMLE and some research is actually probably a bigger thing at "good" programs. Top programs can look beyond that and look for folks they really feel will make a splash in psych and become future leaders in the field. Figure out how you want to do that in your own personal way and start taking the steps to explore how you want to do that during med school by experimenting with different types of reading, research, volunteering and electives that will help you define ideas of what you hope to do and the type of psychiatrist you'd like to be.