Is it a relief to be a resident

Started by Tortaspie
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Tortaspie

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I've heard that residency is stressful and you work a lot, but it seems like it would be a great relief to finally get to that point. Knowing that you've completed med school and just have to focus on working on your residency seems kind of nice.
 
Residency is wayyyyy better than med school. No grades or shelf exams to worry about, what you do actually matters and you get to profoundly affect people's lives, and you are actually getting paid (usually above the median income in the US).
 
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Residency is wayyyyy better than med school. No grades or shelf exams to worry about, what you do actually matters and you get to profoundly affect people's lives, and you are actually getting paid (usually above the median income in the US).
That's something to look forward to for sure.
 
Way easier, though it took me a year or so to get out of med student mode.

You worry about doing the best you can and learning the practice of what you're doing rather than worrying about what some random preceptor thinks of your "enthusiasm"

Seriously, med school sucks. I never understood people who enjoyed their clinical years.
 
Agree with most of this, except the exams part. Yes, shelf exams are gone and boards are over (once you knock out Step 3). But our annual inservice training exam is very stressful. My program places heavy emphasis on this, and failure to score above 50th percentile will earn you extra attention that you do not want. Scores for all residents are sent out to the entire attending staff, so there's no way to hide from what you get.

Yeah I did an ortho rotation 4th year and the pimp game was intense. All of it directed at passing those things.

Most fields are not that serious about inservice exams that I'm aware of.
 
Interesting. I didn't know how other specialties dealt with this, and in fairness, there are many ortho programs that don't worry about it either. However, a few years back we had a run where a couple graduates failed their written boards, and this made the program very upset. The didactics became much more structured and attendance at OITE prep sessions in the couple months before the exam became mandatory.

There is high quality research showing that, if you score below 30th percentile your chief resident year, you are 8x more likely to fail your written boards, so I understand why we are taking it so seriously. However, it can be very difficult for residents who score low, because the way that they are treated by the attendings can become very different overnight. And you have no way to dig yourself out of that hole until you take it again the following year.

My MS3 ortho rotation was back when the residents got their scores back. It was kind of a "aww shucks this is embarrassing" kind of mood more than anything too serious.

The in-service where I'm at isn't all that emphasized , though one or two residents love to have a gunner-off about it. Most treat it as a "well this is where I'm at for a baseline while not studying" sort of thing. As chief this year I found out we had one guy score REALLY low on it, but he was an outlier. We're not quite sure what to make of it, because we haven't had a board fail in a long time.
 
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Way easier, though it took me a year or so to get out of med student mode.

You worry about doing the best you can and learning the practice of what you're doing rather than worrying about what some random preceptor thinks of your "enthusiasm"

Seriously, med school sucks. I never understood people who enjoyed their clinical years.
This is good to know and is really motivating. Many people act like med school is 8 years because of the residency but really the residency is more like just working a job. I want to do RAD or PATH which I know have long residencies.
 
With skills like these, you should work for the Hillary campaign.

Hillary Clinton is one of the worst things that could potentially happen to this country. The last thing we need us another corporatist neo-con masquerading as a liberal.

Agree with most of this, except the exams part. Yes, shelf exams are gone and boards are over (once you knock out Step 3). But our annual inservice training exam is very stressful. My program places heavy emphasis on this, and failure to score above 50th percentile will earn you extra attention that you do not want. Scores for all residents are sent out to the entire attending staff, so there's no way to hide from what you get.

Your program is an outlier in this respect (though it might be specialty specific). At my program (IM) the in service exam is only to inform the resident about his/her knowledge base. So not stressful at all.
 
Residency was so, so much better than med school. And I liked med school a lot. I've said before, as a resident I still had to do things I didn't want to do- wake up early, sleep less, do the less glamorous tasks of various services. But I never had to pretend to like it for the sake of my evals.
 
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It took me a while to realize you aren't @sb247 when reading this. I thought I was having a seizure.
I dislike both clintons but "neocon" isn't really my vernacular

Statist though, statist has passed my lips few times 😉
 
Your program is an outlier in this respect (though it might be specialty specific). At my program (IM) the in service exam is only to inform the resident about his/her knowledge base. So not stressful at all.

It IS specialty specific.

Surgical programs as a whole, not just Ortho and not just Tireds program, take the ITE seriously. Programs are well known to put residents on probation for scores below the 30% percentile; firing someone would also not be out of the ordinary.
 
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Damn. Well. I guess that may factor into into the relative improvement on medical school. The psych inservice exams at my program are looked at as friendly reminders in your progress towards being Board certified.
 
Derm absolutely is.

My program is very similar to Tired's in that scoring below the 50th percentile will definitely earn you some negative attention. And of course, all the attendings get your scores as well.

Why would they give all the attendings your ITE score? Is it just to purposely embarrass you? I don't see how that would help or motivate you, unless you count fear as a motivator. Is that the point?
 
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I agree with the above, residency is much better than medical school. The first and possibly the best aspect of improvement that I've noted is that I now can use the bathroom whenever I want.
 
I suppose it depends how you look at.

The attending staff are our teachers. Our scores are not just a reflection of our own self-directed study, but also the quality of instruction we receive.

Additionally, the test is broken down into subspecialty areas. Presumably if there were a trend that all the residents scored low in one area, that would be a red flag that one division was not providing adequate instruction.

I think that, ideally, dissemination of scores helps individual staff direct and shape their teaching style and efforts to those who are most "at risk". If used incorrectly, it becomes a cudgel to beat us over the head. In reality, it's probably a combination of the two.

Of course, I'm not 100% sure, because I smoke that s*** every year.

If that was the reason, scores would be disseminated anonymously. That way faculty know what areas the residents need to improve. I suspect part of the motivation goes beyond that.
 
If that was the reason, scores would be disseminated anonymously. That way faculty know what areas the residents need to improve. I suspect part of the motivation goes beyond that.
I think @Tired was trying to point towards multiple applications. One to identify trends at large, but another to allow attendings to consider "customizing" (my words not his) their instruction for the most "at risk" residents allowing for the greatest overall improvement.

But he ended by saying he suspects that in reality the exam is often used both as a tool for improvement and fear.
 
I know some of the programs I rotated at use the ITE scores to rank rotation preferences of residents
 
Derm absolutely is.

My program is very similar to Tired's in that scoring below the 50th percentile will definitely earn you some negative attention. And of course, all the attendings get your scores as well.

I was amazed when I interviewed that some programs were very upfront about their lofty expectations. The odd thing, though, is that the busiest programs seemed to be the ones that placed the most emphasis on the ISE, which is counter-intuitive
 
you learn by doing...

Not the esoteric stuff the derm ITE tests. More time in clinic will not make you better at having to know the very long names of the 30 most common chemicals responsible for shoe-associated contact dermatitis, or knowing the 40 most common causes of flower induced contact dermatitis (as well as their Latin names), or knowing which enzymes are defective in a particular type of porphyria (FYI, there are many more types of porphyria than what one learns about in med school), or being able to remember which HLA genotypes are associated with an increased risk of developing rare dermatologic diseases no one ever sees.

If you're expected to do 200-300 pages of reading a week (so you can memorize minutia for the ITE and boards), having to spend more time in clinic takes away from your reading time. Although it may be different in other specialties, I've had advisers and faculty interviewers tell me the same thing: dermatologists who read more, know more.
 
Not the esoteric stuff the derm ITE tests. More time in clinic will not make you better at having to know the very long names of the 30 most common chemicals responsible for shoe-associated contact dermatitis, or knowing the 40 most common causes of flower induced contact dermatitis (as well as their Latin names), or knowing which enzymes are defective in a particular type of porphyria (FYI, there are many more types of porphyria than what one learns about in med school), or being able to remember which HLA genotypes are associated with an increased risk of developing rare dermatologic diseases no one ever sees.

If you're expected to do 200-300 pages of reading a week (so you can memorize minutia for the ITE and boards), having to spend more time in clinic takes away from your reading time. Although it may be different in other specialties, I've had advisers and faculty interviewers tell me the same thing: dermatologists who read more, know more.

Whoa. Is this dermatology? 😵 Is dermatology a speciality of minutiae?
 
Not the esoteric stuff the derm ITE tests. More time in clinic will not make you better at having to know the very long names of the 30 most common chemicals responsible for shoe-associated contact dermatitis, or knowing the 40 most common causes of flower induced contact dermatitis (as well as their Latin names), or knowing which enzymes are defective in a particular type of porphyria (FYI, there are many more types of porphyria than what one learns about in med school), or being able to remember which HLA genotypes are associated with an increased risk of developing rare dermatologic diseases no one ever sees.

If you're expected to do 200-300 pages of reading a week (so you can memorize minutia for the ITE and boards), having to spend more time in clinic takes away from your reading time. Although it may be different in other specialties, I've had advisers and faculty interviewers tell me the same thing: dermatologists who read more, know more.

not totally unique to Derm...

Like it or not, the boards aren't real life, and are just one test out of a 3-7 year learning process. You'll take them in the end and you'll be done (MOC discussion deferred... )
 
Derm absolutely is.

My program is very similar to Tired's in that scoring below the 50th percentile will definitely earn you some negative attention. And of course, all the attendings get your scores as well.

are you at a hotshot derm program then? because it seems illogical for there to be concern about being under 50th percentile, seeing as obviously half of the people who take it have to be there. so I guess it would only make sense if you were at a baller program
 
are you at a hotshot derm program then? because it seems illogical for there to be concern about being under 50th percentile, seeing as obviously half of the people who take it have to be there. so I guess it would only make sense if you were at a baller program
This usually refers to being under 50th %ile for the nation.
 
This usually refers to being under 50th %ile for the nation.

I know but I mean half the residents are still there so it makes no sense to have that policy unless it's a really good program I guess
 
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you learn by doing...
Ideally but as @GuyWhoDoesStuff points out, a lot of ITE stuff is minutiae.

In surgery, as a matter of fact, programs that work you the hardest in terms of hours are known to generally have lower ITE scores; I mean you aren't seeing glucagonomas every day and doing a truncal vagotomy and antrectomy frequently, but they *love* to ask about those things.
 
Well, maybe not that difficult. If you consider that not all programs feel this way, you certainly shouldn't have trouble beating out all the programs where they know it doesn't affect them and hence don't study for it.

I understand the suspicion a lot of folks view these exams with, but I think ultimately it comes down to your perception of the role of testing.

If you believe that testing is a valid assessment of knowledge and development in a field, then everything that's been said here makes sense (take it serious, study, send out scores to everyone, utilize test scores as a basis for remediation and/or disciplinary action). If you think that testing is a detached from peoples' skills as a physician, it all seems arbitrary and wrong.

Personally, I have anecdotally observed a close correlation between test scores and presentation skill/operative skill/decision making on call, and I'm a believer. Granted, this may be easy for me say because I typically do quite well, but it is what I've observed nonetheless. I have yet to meet someone (at any level) who is only a "poor test taker," though I've met many people who claim to be. Poor performance on testing always seems to be accompanied by other defects in performance, it's just that the "poor test taker" usually doesn't acknowledge them. Of the several people who have left my program during my time, most had poor performance on the in-training exam, but in no case was this the only deficiency (and the others were typically obvious).

Not a popular opinion on SDN, I know, but certainly what I've seen in real life.
I tend to agree with this, though I don't much care for percentiles. The FM ITE gives you a raw score that correlates very well with board passing. They used to give our percentiles as well but I think they've done away with that - which is a good idea to my mind.