I'm interested in Radiology and have several questions. 1) How does the match application work for the PGY1 year and radiology residency? 2) Do I write two separate personal statements for prelim medicine and radiology? 3) Is there a separate ROL for each? 4) Will I need to interview at double(approx) the number of places? 5) If my second choice specialty is medicine, can I rank those programs as well?
1) There's one primary rank list, where you'll be ranking all the radiology programs. For those programs that don't have a transitional year included (the majority) there is a supplemental Rank order list. Example is below Primary ROL 1. MGH--A 2. Duke--B 3. U Wash--C A list 1. Transitional in Boston 2. Prelim in Boston B list 1. Transitional at Duke 2. Prelim at Duke C list 1. Transitional in St. Louis 2. Prelim in St. Louis If you match at your second choice, it'll move on to the B list for your PGY1 year and try and match you into one of these programs. 2) Yep, I did but I guess you don't have to. 3) Sort of, but in your primary ROL, you can list prelim positions at the end as absolute back up so that at least you'll match somewhere. 4) Yes, and this is what sucked about the whole process. I did 15 radiology interviews and 5 transitional year ones. 5) Yes, you can rank medicine AFTER all the radiology slots. The only problem with this is that on the Monday of match week, when you find out IF you matched, you won't know whether you matched into radiology of a categorical medicine. If you rank prelim med positions at the end of your ROL and NO cat medicine positions, you'll know that you matched into either radiology or just a first year position on that Monday. AGain, good luck.
Good descriptin by Jim of how the advanced / prelim match works. As for your other questions: 2. I basically added a paragraph at the end of my radiology personal statement saying what I was looking for in a transitional / prelim program. The rest of it was the same. 3. Yes, see Jim's answer. 4. You probably won't have to interview at double the spots, but more than other people. What I did was interview at some prelims near some of my rads interviews (especially on the west coast). However, for most of my midwest programs, I ranked transitional / prelim programs in the same town as my med school so I wouldn't have to move twice. 5. See Jim's answer.
Thanks all for your help. I do have one more question. If I were to rank categorical medicine programs at the end of the ROL after rads program, would I be force to "lie" to the med programs by not telling them during the interview that I'd really rather do radiology? Thanks again, Jacob
That I can't really answer, but I was never asked on my radiology interviews if I was interested in another field as well so I'm assuming that if you go to an interview, they won't question your desire to be in the specialty. For categorical medicine though, I would certainly have a different personal letter tailored to that specialty and one tailored to radiology.
