Retina Fellowship Application Prep

[Stockli Retina]

I am a PGY3 resident interested in surgical retina. I come from a community/county based program with fantastic clinical/surgical experience but no academic ties and extremely limited opportunities to do research. I am worried about coming from such a program will hurt my chances of getting a fellowship. I have tried to start some research projects but there are a lot huddles to jump through here so I do not have any solid research projects going at the moment. We do have full time faculty here but many of them are younger attendings who do not have particular ties or pull to help with connections.

I am worried about ways to help strength my application so that I have the best shot at matching. Does anyone have any advice to help with beefing up my application? Like should I focus more on research? Should I try to contact people at other programs that I am interested in? There do not seem to be any options to do any kind of away rotations like back in medical school unfortunately.

I have looked around through various threads and some posters have suggested that I reach out to other programs and try to connect with faculty who may possibly have some kind of pull or even potentially research experiences. Does anyone have any experience with reaching out cold call to these other programs?

Thank you!

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