short-tracking?

[eidolon]

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Question for those with experience with this topic:
1. how soon after starting internship does one need to decide whether to short-track into a subspecialty or not
2. if a person converts from a prelim med intern to a categorical early on during the year, does one still have the option of short-track
appreciate any feedback

 

[BStein76]

Question for those with experience with this topic:
1. how soon after starting internship does one need to decide whether to short-track into a subspecialty or not
2. if a person converts from a prelim med intern to a categorical early on during the year, does one still have the option of short-track
appreciate any feedback

1) For at least Washington University, SCIP (Stanford), UCSD, and UCSF (molecular medicine), you apply for the categorical and short-track programs at the same time and interview at the same time. On the other hand, the ABIM research track at Baylor reviews your progress as an intern before letting you short track.
2) I would think programs such as Baylor where they wait until you have completed some of your intern year before accepting people into the research track might allow this, but I am not sure.

 

[AJM]

At Stanford you can also decide into your intern year whether you want to short track outside of the SCIP program. But you need to decide by September or so of intern year so that you can get approval from the program and start applying for fellowships, since fellowship applications would be due by December/January of intern year.

Most programs that don't have a formal short track programs require you to decide very early on in your intern year to short track, because you have to secure a fellowship program in order to proceed with short tracking.

As far as the converting prelim med to categorical and then short tracking, it would be very difficult mostly because you would have to convert to categorical very early in the year (again, before fellowship applications start). I would imagine that this kind of thing would be dependent on your program as to whether they would allow you to do something like this.