Internship in CA or close to home?

[Drowzee]

I have my heart set on a residency program in the Bay Area. The program is about 50/50 categorical vs. advanced spots and the residents I talked to gave mixed reviews about the categorical intern year. Because of this, I'm leaning towards doing a separate intern year. Would I be better to to spend intern year close to (but not at the same place) where I'll be doing the rest of my residency or stay close to home for intern year and save money (to put towards future ridiculous rent prices in CA)? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! I'd love to hear from people that are in the Bay Area and living on a resident's salary.

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[AdmiralChz]

In my program it is roughly 1/2 categorical and 1/2 advanced, I'll tackle the categorical argument - being categorical absolutely gets you a leg up heading into your clinical training years as you are absolutely familiar with the area, hospital organization, EMR and even faculty members in your department. This honestly becomes a non-issue by about the 5th or 6th month but greatly helps decrease the stress of starting a whole new residency. I was even able to get some research projects off the ground by the start of my clinical anesthesia training.

There are tons of legitimate reasons to go for advanced positions with internship elsewhere, but over the past few years the applicant pool has been very, very largely skewed towards categorical interest. Some (most?) anesthesia programs are having trouble even giving away their advanced spots (while having minimal trouble with categorical slots), there simply isn't the demand for it. By next year we will be down to 1 or 2 advanced spots from 10, just going with the changing preferences of medical school graduates. Most other programs, at least around us in the SE, are in the process of switching over the next several years as well.