Gold posts that may help you guys during ranking time. I'm glad I was able to get feedback from some of the awesome people I met here on SDN. Everyone's preferences are different ....(but mind are along the line of the posts below)
OP: IlDestriero
"Some of my thoughts, with a caveat at the end.
Just as the quality of your undergraduate University and MCAT scores affects the competitiveness of your Medical School application and the quality of your medical school and USMLE scores affects the competitiveness of your residency application, the quality/prestige of your residency training will affect your job search and marketability. Prospective employers want to know that you can handle the workload in their practice and that you will pass your boards on the first attempt, and not become a thorn in their sides down the road. For many reasons it is in your best interest to train at the best program that you can get into. By the best program I mean a program which does very complex cases on a regular basis, easily exceeds all of their numbers and has a reasonably happy and stable resident class. If everyone that you talk to at the interview is unhappy because they are worked to death every day, given infrequent or poor lectures, and/or feel unprepared to handle challenging cases, you too will be miserable and poorly trained and would likely do better at a different (though still strong) program. Even worse would be a program where everyone barely meets their numbers or requires "creative accounting", having to send you to other hospitals for several out rotations, etc. It is one thing to say that the ICU training or pain clinic is weak and send you to another hospital for this small component of your education, it is quite another if many of your cases at your home program are ASA 1 or 2 or outpatient (or ASA 3/4 eyeballs!) and you are going out for hearts and vascular or trauma and peds cases.
However with regards to post residency competitiveness for jobs, if you are certain that you want to live in a particular area of the country you would probably increase your likelihood of finding a job there by attending the best residency program that you could in that region, unless you can match at an elite program with national name recognition. Why? Because your future employers/partners will be personally familiar with graduates of your residency program, if not graduates themselves.
One last caveat- if you are planning to relocate across the country to go to an elite program primarily for the name but intend to relocate again after residency is over, be sure that the program that you think is "elite" is actually NATIONALLY recognized as an elite program and not just regionally recognized as a superior program. It is difficult to come up with a good example but Vanderbilt or UNC may have extraordinary anesthesia programs, but coming from New England and now California, I don't know anything about them, as opposed to Mass General, Mayo, Hopkins, or Stanford who's names are known worldwide.
The fact is that pedigree, and being selected as a Chief Resident, will open doors for you. You will get an interview where others will not. You may not get the job and you almost certainly will not get a better offer, but you will get an interview just because you have Harvard Medical School or a Mass General residency on your CV. This bias will likely decrease as ones career goes on. I will not deny however that an elite degree is probably overrated. Trust that I know about that of which I speak as I was an attending for several years before returning to academia for a fellowship and I was on the job interview circuit again myself not that long ago. The network of the prestige programs is real and can only help you, now and in the future. If you've got "it" all you need is an interview to show it off.
Good luck with your difficult ranking decisions and trust your judgement. Wherever you end up, make the most of your opportunities and be a star and you will succeed."
OP: SCnH20, Thank you for your advice last year 🙂
"For those of you touting "location" as the most important thing, I think you're spot-on. That's the one thing I didn't believe when I was starting to apply that I found out to be most true. Here's what I wrote, this is from a document I made regarding the whole application process and posted on our school's Anesthesia Interest Group secure site:
Location, location, location. Read that again. I GUARANTEE you that at the end of the day, most if not all of the reasons you pick your top 2-3 programs will be due to location. Even though you probably dont believe me now (Lord knows I didnt believe it myself this time last year), just remember I said something about this and come and read this again after youve done a couple of interviews. Save yourself the time, expense, and trouble (especially the trouble) and be honest with yourself (and spouse/significant other) about where you want/need to go. Interviewing somewhere where you would never really want to live is going to help nobody, least of all yourself.
If you have geographic wants/needs, pay special attention to those. In general, people with children (or who may be planning on them during residency) will prefer smaller towns with good schools, safe locations, etc. (Interestingly enough, most of the residency programs at these locations are filled with
.people with children compared to the big cities. Hmm
).
Conversely, single people and those without children tend to gravitate towards larger cities. It goes without saying that you will generally fit in better with fellow residents who are in situations similar to yours. I myself would not (and did not) fit in very well at programs where 80% of the residents had children. There is nothing wrong with the programs (and nothing wrong with children), it was just not a good fit for me. I would venture to guess that the converse is also true. If you think about this early on and find out the information about the locations before you apply/schedule an interview, you can save yourself some time and trouble during interview season.
Regardless, think long and hard before you apply to places (or wait and think long and hard before scheduling an interview once you get an invitation). There may be excellent programs out there that you like (Mayo was a good example for me), but would NEVER go there because of the location, or because you dont fit in with the residents (who are more-often-than note predominately made up of one of the demographics described above).
Dont think of the interviewing process as some sort of quest for the Holy Grail. There are probably 10-15 programs (or more) out there that would be an excellent fit for you. There are certainly tons of programs that provide great training in anesthesia (for academics, private practice, mixture of both, etc). I would think of them more as being in tiers of programs, and many programs in similar tiers will be, for all intents and purposes, reasonably similar.
Your job is now to decide 1) what type of location you desire; and 2) if you fit in with the other residents or not. You will quickly figure out what tier of programs you should be looking at by which places give you interviews (of course you should probably have backups in lower tiers as well as reach schools in higher tiers)."
