How many FYGME programs must one apply to? (army specific)

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I was wondering,
When applying for a residency program/FYGME, from the HPSP, to how many "military programs" must one apply (Army specifically)?

For example, in the Army I have seen that there is only 1 Neurosurgery residency (2 spots for FYGME). Must you apply to both and the have civilian residencies lined up?

Or, for general surgery, there are 5 Army programs. When applying during 4th year, must one apply to all 5?

Note: I'm not in med-school, nor in the military. I'm researching options as I will be applying to med-school soon. I'm a non-trad. and have been doing research on military grants for a little while now. I've had many questions answered by reading the threads, but I can't find any information on this subject anywhere.

Thanks

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For the Army, you have five spots in your rank order list. If your residency of choice has more than five options, then you rank your top five. If your residency of choice has less than five options, then you list all of them in order of preference, then fill out the rest with transitionals/prelim internships. I have been told that you can't rank 'civilian deferral' as one of your five spots, that you have to apply for that separately (but don't quote me on that point as I'm not quite there yet). Also, for the Army, you cannot rank/apply for more than one specialty. As in, you can't rank both Anesthesiology programs, then the three Emergency Medicine programs.

So, to take your Neurosurgery example, you'd probably apply for civilian deferral, then also "rank" the one Neurosurgery program, followed by four internships.
 
Psychblender is mostly correct...

In the army you must rank all 5 positions, and there is no official "civilian deferral" rank as there is in the air force. You are also required to rank every program in your specialty area if there are less than 5.

So if your chosen specialty has 5 or more spots, you rank them in your order of preference. If your specialty has less than 5, you rank all the spots in the order of your preference and fill the remaining spots with other positions that are acceptable to you (traditionally the remaining spots in these cases are transitional/surgical/family medicine internships that prepare the applicant to reapply for whatever specialty he desires or to head out as a GMO), but the applicant can rank any programs they choose in those extra spots.

Thus, the rotations students do at the MEDCENS take on even more importance for these specialties with only a few programs as applicants that would be competetive for these programs in the civilian match are able to meet with the consultant. The consultant can then get a feel for the applicant and let him know if there are deferred spots in the specialty that year and whether the applicant is likely to get one and be free to apply in the civilian match (a friend of mine applying for urology was asked by the consultant if he wanted to train military or civilian; he said he had no preference and was told by the consultant he would get one of the deferred spots, such is the way the military works). Then, the most competetive applicants get the deferrals (if there are any) and the rest get one of the preliminary internships or back-up specilaties they ranked.

The important thing to remember is that one cannot be matched to a spot he did not apply for, so do not rank IM or FP in these spots as a lark because you may get it. When I applied, I ranked my specialty's spots 1, 2, and 3. Then, because I would have rather been deferred to a civilian residency than do a preliminary internship and reapply, I ranked dermatology and radiology 4 and 5, knowing there was no way I'd match those competetive specialties having never rotated in them.

Then, after all my machinations, I ended up getting my first choice.
 
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For the army, do residency directors have input for the residents they will take?

I recently read that the AF has some great meeting of the minds and just assigns residents that way, rather than allowing their residency directors to choose who they want. This would of course effectively remove the need to rotate at the hospital you want to do a residency in...but it sounds like a horrible way to do things.


In regards to the last post. In effect, you can rank different specialties when you match for the army. You are saying that for your five spots you could choose... ER, ER, ER (and since there are only three, you could then pick) Rad, Neurosurg or something like that to fill the remaining two slots. I was under the impression that the match would even give you that option.
 
For the army, do residency directors have input for the residents they will take?

I recently read that the AF has some great meeting of the minds and just assigns residents that way, rather than allowing their residency directors to choose who they want. This would of course effectively remove the need to rotate at the hospital you want to do a residency in...but it sounds like a horrible way to do things.


In regards to the last post. In effect, you can rank different specialties when you match for the army. You are saying that for your five spots you could choose... ER, ER, ER (and since there are only three, you could then pick) Rad, Neurosurg or something like that to fill the remaining two slots. I was under the impression that the match would even give you that option.

In my experience, program directors have the single biggest impact on residency selection. There is a point system that (supposedly) ranks applicants subjectively, and all other things being equal, this decides who gets a highly sought after spot, but there is a nebulous phrase in the SOP that gives the PD leeway to evaluate unquantifiable talents or defects when selecting an applicant. In my experience, this leeway is not used to give a spot to a "fortunate son" but to deny a bad applicant who has a number of GMO tours under his belt and has more points than any other applicant.

PD's and the specialty consultant generally have a very good idea of where everyone is going to go when they head to the GME selection meeting in November (this is the Army meeting of the minds to which you refer). This is not to say that people do not get screwed at this meeting because they do; unfortunately this is almost inevitable due to the constraints of Army GME (in my wife's specialty for example, there were barely enough applicants to cover the intern spots that absolutely needed to be filled, and there were not enough people ranking certain programs. The result was qualified applicants getting their 5th choice program cause that program had a certain number of spots that absolutely needed to be filled for the hospital to run).

The rules of the army match require that you declare a specialty goal. Then, if there are more than 5 programs in your specialty you rank your top 5. If there are less than 5 programs you must apply to every program in your desired specialty and are then free to rank whatever you like in the remaining spots. So for ER ( I believe there are still only 3 programs) one would declare ER the specialty goal and rank Darnall, BAMC, and MAMC in whatever order he prefers. He is then free to rank whatever he wants in the remaining spots.

This is why rotating at programs is so vital: you need a chance to meet the PD and consultant to find out if deferral is a possibility and whether you are competetive for an Army spot of deferral spot. Only PD's know that kind of stuff. My PD told me that I was very competetive for the Army match and would almost certainly get a deferral if I did not match an Army program. Knowing this, I ranked nothing that I could have possibly matched into in my left over spots to be sure I'd get a deferral. Had I ranked a TY spot, even though the PD told me he'd fight to get me deferred, there was a possibility that a hospital might so desperately need an intern that I'd get stuck in that TY instead of getting my deferral.
 
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