Ophthalmology Residency - What are my chances?

[Cucumber Richard]

Hello SDN community,

I'm a third year med student who's recently been contemplating applying to an ophtho residency (TLDR - Feel free to skip intro to bullets for a summary of my app).

I've been fairly set on psychiatry for most of my med school career for a handful of reasons chiefly ability to help psych patients, many of which face a huge stigma, to have the ability to be independent from a hospital later in my career, the lifestyle, a love of neurology manifest as behavior and cognition, and an interest in emerging psych modalities, such as TMS and psychedelic therapies.
After assisting on surgeries during my clerkships, I've realized that I actually quite enjoy procedural medicine, which is a big aspect of psychiatry which drew me in, the interventional psychiatry. But beyond that, psychiatry procedures can be enumerated on one hand and none of it is truly "hands on" per se. This has forced me to consider other possible specialties (as third year does to many..) and I started considering Ophthalmology for the past 2 months, primarily because the eye is a wonderful organ, there is ample neurology to be studied, a similar potential for stand-alone medicine in the future, a good lifestyle, but importantly, a significantly larger scope of procedural treatment. The biggest drawback is that while most other optho-intent med students have had their sights set for much longer than I have (pun intended) and had time to do more research on the subject, I only have a second authorship in a case study published on an online journal.. I plan on doing some shadowing during some white space I have coming up, but that's about all I have that's really ophto-centric. I'm currently on my Medicine and Surgery clerkship block and haven't taken step 2 yet, so I know a lot is riding on that step 2 score..

Here's an overview of my current application:

Academics
- High-Satisfactory in Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Ob/Gyn.
- Passed everything my first 2 years as Satisfactory.

Research
- Retro cohort Study on rTMS - Publication pending, 1 national conference poster presentation
- Retro cohort Study on rTMS and Ketamine - Online abstract publication, 1 national conference poster presentation
- Retro cohort on concierge medicine in and endocrinology clinic - 1 State conference presentation
- Lit. review on Choroid plexus tumors - Online journal Publication
- Lit. Review on peripheral nerve biopsy - publication pending
- Case study on Charles Bonnet Syndrome - Online journal pub

Extra-Curricular
- President of the World Health Interest Group
- Member of my school's COVID relief group back in 2021

I realize I don't have too many metrics for my academic performance, but that's kinda tough with the new Pass/Fail step 1. What do you all think? Do I have a shot?
Thanks in advance!

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[eyeeye_captain]

Pretty hard to say based on how early it is. I’m assuming those pre-clinical grades get reported and there are higher grades than satisfactory based on your clinical grades. Getting more ophtho-specific research will help. Killing Step 2 would help. It’s not exactly a slam dunk resume at the moment. The wild card is how good your home department is. If you make the right connections, someone can go to bat for you, and that really matters in such a small field (~19,000 total docs in the US). Away rotations can help (or hurt). A research year can help if you’re productive.

TL;DR it’s possible but you’ve got some significant work to do.