Could someone explain the difference between PGY1 and PGY2?? My understanding is that people in PGY are entering first year of residency right out of med school. While PGY2 are people who have done a year of residency and have applied for a different one after that year? Is that the case?? If it is how does it work? Do you keep your first year residency if you dont match in 2nd year???
TIA
Edit: Oops... just realized how old this thread was... lol... well it got a nice bump...
I can try and explain it, the older folks can correct me if I'm wrong.
You have the basic idea right. PGY1 = post-graduate year 1, PGY2 = post-graduate year 2. But here's the thing. There are some specialties (radiology, anesthesiology, neurology, ophthalmology come to mind, but there may be more I don't remember) that require you to do one year of either Internal Medicine or Surgery residency BEFORE you can start your chosen field's residency.
So let's take anesthesia as an example. In the US, if you want to go into anes., you have to match to a PGY-1 preliminary program in either internal medicine or surgery (your choice) AND into a PGY2-4 anesthesiology residency. Many times these are programs in totally different hospitals or even cities. And yes, when you're applying to one of these specialties, you have to also apply for individual prelim programs, interview, etc.
Things are further complicated by the fact that some programs are entirely integrated so you can match to one hospital for all four years- but I'm pretty sure the first year is still considered a "preliminary" year.
Another option for all of these advanced (PGY2) residencies for the PGY1 year is the "transitional year", which as far as I understand is a bit of a mix of medicine and surgery and it's super mellow, so transitional years (unlike preliminary years) are actually pretty hard to match into. So let's say that you want to apply for an anesthesiology residency. You might apply to a few integrated programs (PGY1-4 in the same hospital), a bunch of PGY2-4 anesthesiology programs, a bunch of PGY1 prelim programs, and a bunch of PGY1 "transitional year" programs.
So a few days before Match day (might be tomorrow actually) you find out whether you have matched a prelim program, an advanced program (PGY2) or both. If you didn't match one or both, you enter the Scramble (which you may already know about, so Im not gonna go into it). So an accurate Match list should show where a student going into one of these specialties matched both for PGY1 and PGY2. Unfortunately, many match lists try to make it look like more people matched than actually did by using different lines for a PGY1 and a PGY2 position for the same person- which is dumb, cause the two things are related.
Also, if you're not a great student and you didn't get into an advanced position, you may only have a prelim year spot. That should be clear in match lists as well, because prelim spots aren't very competitive while, say, radiology is. Those people generally try to do as well as possible during their PGY1 year and then they reapply the year after for a PGY2 position with a year of being a doctor under their belt. They can also apply for a different residency.
Finally, PGY1-only prelim years can be used as a "last resort" for students who have to scramble in any specialty. So let's say you want to go into general surgery (which is an integrated specialty, meaning you start gen surg as a PGY1) but you don't match and you can't scramble into a surgery spot, or you don't even want to bother applying cause you know you're not a strong candidate. You may choose to scramble/match into a prelim surgery spot instead and reapply after that year with new recommendation letters and such.
Ok, I think I covered everything. Sorry if I made things more complicated than they really are- I just was confused about this myself a while ago so I tried to explain it as well as I could.
