SOAP 2018 Thread

[Asterias12]

Adjunct university or community college instructors/professors have to be "academically" or "professionally" qualified. This varies depending on the accreditor's requirements* and, occasionally, the state where the school is located (e.g. California and Oregon may have distinct requirements). You can look at a school's website to find their accreditor and the accreditor's website to find the requirements.

Academically qualified means the degree attained by the instructor. Professionally qualified means the on-the-job experience. Someone with a PhD in bio is academically qualified to teach bio. Bill Gates is professionally qualified to teach computer science, or entrepreneurship even though he didn't obtain a BA/BS. Professionally qualified is subjective.

Generally, someone with a BA/BS can teach community college general education (say office skills, excel and powerpoint), someone with a Masters can teach BA/BS classes and someone with a PhD can teach Masters or BA/BS. But if someone is professionally qualified they can teach up a level. For example, I have a masters but teach masters-level students because I have specialized training in finance.

With an MD, you might be considered by some schools and accreditors to be equivalent to a PhD (for approval to teach, not for tenure or a permanent full-time position). It just depends. You'd likely be qualified to teach bio or chem if your undergrad degree is in bio or chem but not if your undergrad degree is in economics, for example.

Best idea is to reach out to any professors or deans that you know at local colleges. That's how I got my first college teaching job.

You can also try the Chronicle of Higher Education which has a huge job search engine and you can have new jobs emailed to you based on criteria that you select.

Good luck!

*Accreditors include:

• Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE)
• New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC CIHE)
• New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC CTCI)
• North Central Association Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement (NCA CASI)

Thanks a lot! Good to know this.

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[Asterias12]

It is not really a program. Missouri state has passed a law allowing medical grads to practice primary care as Assistant Physician. It is only open to MDs with step 1 and step 2...but not step 3 and no PGY-1 from my understanding. If you meet the requirements, you need to apply for a AP license, find a supervising physician and "shadow" him for 30 days, then you will be able to practice in underserved areas of Missouri.

Okay, that's explanatory. But one of the requirements is either the US citizenship or PR, so it's not an option for an IMG who requires visa. Thanks for your response.

 

[Asterias12]

I googled it last year and found a list with stars next to programs anticipated to be accredited in 2017.

Thanks, I will try that.

 

[IamMOREthenjustMD]

How can you teach at a college or be pharm rep? Thanks for writing just a detailed and positive post?

Teaching at a college or being a pharm rep is easy you just have to apply for the job. I would suggest zip recruiter or any of the major job websites to look for openings. If you are planning to reapply to residency or continue your medical career in 1 year i suggest writing a cover letter that explains your situation and how long you are looking to stay in the job. know that teaching at a college and pharm reps are not "1 year jobs" they are more of an alternative career for 2 reasons. first any employer does not want to train someone who will leave in a year. Second, to make really good money (doctor money) in those fields you need to think long term advancement opportunity (esp in pharm sales).
Keep in mind if you are planning to stay in medicine that a lot of jobs will overlook you because you may be leaving in a year to continue medicine. If you keep this in mind you wont get discouraged when places don't call you back. Ziprecuriter is good for that because you can apply to many jobs with "just one click". Jobs that will be ok with you leaving in a year tend to be jobs like "scribe, Medical assistant, research assistant" these pay less and are likely to be part time.

TIPS: have a few versions of your resume: one for each field that you are applying to. For example a resume that highlights your teaching skills/tutoring experience and one that highlights your clinical experience. I would add your clinical rotations to your clinical resume for a pharm job (or any clinical job) because it helps them know what specialty you have direct experience with. Also mention that you passed the step exams on your resume (and if you are ECFMG certified yet or the date you will be) because it adds to your qualifications. Anther tip is to apply as early as possible because some places take months to reply to you esp the brand names like CityMD or Scribe America. If you are looking for a job much sooner then look on craigslist in your area (be very careful with your information craigslist) because they tend to be private clinics that need to hire more immediately. For craigslist edit your resume so It only has your email (no address or phone number) and have your last name as first letter only.

Teaching jobs: If you are applying for a teaching job many of them will require you to describe your teaching philosophy. Don't get freaked out by this, this is easy to write and there are many examples online. I found that I got a better response for teaching jobs when I applied from the school/company website directly.

Hope this helps, best of luck. Also finding a job is hard for anyone so don't get discouraged when people don't reply right away. stay positive and keep applying.

 

[Asterias12]

Teaching at a college or being a pharm rep is easy you just have to apply for the job. I would suggest zip recruiter or any of the major job websites to look for openings. If you are planning to reapply to residency or continue your medical career in 1 year i suggest writing a cover letter that explains your situation and how long you are looking to stay in the job. know that teaching at a college and pharm reps are not "1 year jobs" they are more of an alternative career for 2 reasons. first any employer does not want to train someone who will leave in a year. Second, to make really good money (doctor money) in those fields you need to think long term advancement opportunity (esp in pharm sales).
Keep in mind if you are planning to stay in medicine that a lot of jobs will overlook you because you may be leaving in a year to continue medicine. If you keep this in mind you wont get discouraged when places don't call you back. Ziprecuriter is good for that because you can apply to many jobs with "just one click". Jobs that will be ok with you leaving in a year tend to be jobs like "scribe, Medical assistant, research assistant" these pay less and are likely to be part time.

TIPS: have a few versions of your resume: one for each field that you are applying to. For example a resume that highlights your teaching skills/tutoring experience and one that highlights your clinical experience. I would add your clinical rotations to your clinical resume for a pharm job (or any clinical job) because it helps them know what specialty you have direct experience with. Also mention that you passed the step exams on your resume (and if you are ECFMG certified yet or the date you will be) because it adds to your qualifications. Anther tip is to apply as early as possible because some places take months to reply to you esp the brand names like CityMD or Scribe America. If you are looking for a job much sooner then look on craigslist in your area (be very careful with your information craigslist) because they tend to be private clinics that need to hire more immediately. For craigslist edit your resume so It only has your email (no address or phone number) and have your last name as first letter only.

Teaching jobs: If you are applying for a teaching job many of them will require you to describe your teaching philosophy. Don't get freaked out by this, this is easy to write and there are many examples online. I found that I got a better response for teaching jobs when I applied from the school/company website directly.

Hope this helps, best of luck. Also finding a job is hard for anyone so don't get discouraged when people don't reply right away. stay positive and keep applying.

Thanks a lot, for taking out time and writing the detailed explanation. It is certainly helpful!

 

[randomcollusion]

I've been meaning to post here but I forgot as I've been so busy.

I don't think anyone here remembers me as I've only ever posted in SOAP threads, but if you look at my post history you will see that I went through SOAP in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Well, I matched to a categorical position in 2018 to my first choice. As far as I know, a person matching on their fourth consecutive try is pretty unheard of, but so is not matching as an AMG from a competitive institution for 3 years.

I don't feel ecstatic about it as it doesn't come as a surprise to me - I worked really really hard for this and had fully laid out my career in the event that I matched or I didn't match. This was practically a team effort with a lot of people behind me, and I am in enormous debt to all of them.

I don't know if this will be the case for anyone else, but addressing your faults and staying productive was a gargantuan effort. Here's some notes on what I did - they may not be of help to anyone, and if so, that's ok. But I know in the past few years I was open to any idea at all and needed some leads in order to get myself out of bed and thinking about the future.

1. Apply to every residency position in your chosen specialty. Objectively, this is a shared characteristic of my successful applications to medical school and residency. Yes, it costs $5000. But it was the only way I could close the door on my first specialty choice and start seriously thinking about changing it.
2. Networking. Research was the best way to do this for me, because I'm not afraid of statistics and spent my free time continuing to learn it. I learned how to write grants, write manuscripts, write protocol, write IRB applications, perform analyses, perform visualizations, write recruitment materials, write FDA applications - most guides to that stuff that are free on the internet are pretty good. Physicians, even MD/PhDs, don't have time to do all that stuff. I know this is privileged talk, but if you can start off volunteering your time and show that you're competent, most physician PIs will try to fast track you into a paid position on their current or next grant. I got lucky and had done research for a physician in medical school who hired me when I didn't match, and that eventually led to me being in the best situation to match.
   1. Any physician or professor or staff affiliated with a program has the power to introduce you to people more acquainted with the program that interests you. I was completely honest and open with everybody I met. My goals, my red flags, I put everything on the table way, way in advance of any re-application, to dispel any fear of manipulation and to make it crystal clear who I was, what I wanted, what my problems were, and what I could offer. I realized that people looked at me and wondered "why didn't this person get in? What's wrong with them that they aren't telling me?" and so I gave an honest accounting of myself.
   2. I was introduced to attending affiliated with a residency program that wasn't my initial chosen specialty, but was actually pretty close. Actually, I could have probably requested to network with physicians in my original chosen specialty, but I kind of felt that I'd had it. I tried my best, they weren't interested, so I decided it wasn't for me. Luckily, there is a lot of overlap in medical specialties so it wasn't hard for me to seriously think about a different career.
   3. I asked the program director to tell me more about the program and about the specialty in general, and I got materials to read to give me more of an idea. You know, stuff that I should have been doing in my 3rd and 4th year of medical school. I went to didactics and asked permission to attend practical workshops as appropriate. The attendings that knew my situation were really accommodating because there was ample time to get this all set up and to vet me for any problems requiring an exit strategy on their part, and the residents were quite friendly. My PI also supported me in this as long as I kept up with the rest of my work, which was the most important.
   4. I basically turned myself into a research coordinator, which ended up benefiting me a lot because it's a perfect complement to physicians who don't have the time or inclination to dive deep into the regulatory and statistical side of clinical research. Residents appreciated it when I showed them how to use citation managers, collaborative document editing, and systematic literature search techniques. I worked with attendings to develop lectures on study design and introductory clinical biostatistics and presented a lecture on it during an unscheduled didactics hour. It was a lot of work and I didn't do it that well, but I followed up by helping the residents and attendings do more ambitious stuff like writing IRB applications and writing protocol. Then when they got comfortable with that, I started to encourage them to write grants, using my experience with collaborative brainstorming and document editing to almost painlessly have multiple physicians write full NIH-style grants. Essentially, I was doing all the learning and background work that they didn't have time to do. This was also supported by my PI, and I had to juggle my actual job with doing all this stuff, and frequently pulled 12-14 hour days and weekends. If I was hired by the department directly, life would have been so much easier.
   5. Eventually, I got the residents to be interested in research for real and sort of became their point person for getting clinical trials, chart reviews, systematic reviews, and quality improvement projects off the ground, because I was always willing to work with the regulatory bureaucracy. I learned R and started seriously upgrading my statistical knowledge, going from qualitative analysis to factor based stuff beyond t tests like ANOVA and ANCOVA and dabbling in regression modeling. This helped establish my cred in journal club because I could point out study design and statistical problems in studies while the attendings and residents had the clinical elements covered.
   6. I just generally made myself available and approachable and acted like a human being around residents, attendings, the program director, and the chief of the service.
3. Despite all the networking I did, I failed to match last year. I was depressed for a bit, but I was able to show that I wasn't just motivated to get ranked but that I actually liked the people I worked with and helped and wasn't trying to blackmail them into a position where they would owe me. The easiest way to do this is to sincerely enjoy working with the people you network with and to start developing real plans for working with them in the future even if you don't match. I was very lucky to be introduced to these people that were just generally compatible with me and I grabbed on to that as hard as I could.
4. I went pretty full research and that actually hurt me, explaining why I didn't match last year even though everyone was ok with me as a person. I filled a research gap in the program because the primary priority of the program was to create excellent clinicians, but that meant that not increasing my clinical skills was double worrisome. Going to didactics helped, but I wasn't growing my clinical expertise, and that reservation was the single biggest factor holding me, and I expect most unmatched graduates, back from being ranked in a clinically oriented program. What sort of saved me is that the deficiencies specifically mentioned in my MSPE were addressed by cross-applicable skills from my research activities, like time management, patient interaction, knowledge of evidence based practice guidelines, that sort of thing. I knew that the programs interested in me were interested in my research skills, but they were afraid of my lack of clinical skills. I get the feeling that I could have gotten in last year if I slowed down on the research and did whatever I could get a hold of in unconventional clinical experiences, like AAFP CME stuff or getting special dispensation from the hospital or a physician's clinic to do more hands on shadowing, something like that.
5. I am a bad interviewee. I had to accept that and devote an enormous amount of time towards interview prep, because without realizing it I was doing a lot of boneheaded things in my interviews. I was making controversial points, I was criticizing programs, I was putting the interviewer on the spot, I was being too spontaneous with what should be bread-and-butter questions everybody asks, I didn't really have any insightful questions to ask after interviewers, and so on. The same people I had gotten to know offered me plenty of advice and I accepted all of it, preparing for it like I prepared for the MCAT or Step 2.

That's a lot of words just to say I put myself out there and worked like mad to build clinically relevant skills despite there being no clear pathway to success. If I didn't match, I'd go for a CDA or something or maybe become a clinical monitor or consultant for industry because I had to deal with them so much when doing the FDA stuff. Basically, if you can get a physician to root for you, do everything you possibly can for them so you can develop a relationship with more and more people and sculpt some sort of resume out of clay. If everyone thinks that you've got loads of opportunities as an MD, even if that's not apparently true, capitalize on that and throw your degree around to get other people to give you opportunities. There's a chance that this brings you back to residency even if it takes a long time.


edit: Also, I don't know how much this matters, but create your NRMP profile as soon as it is available to create. Programs can't rank you until you make one, and if you don't have one on the day they sit down and rank applicants, it just might happen that they skip over you for the sake of convenience if you're borderline. You can be days late in submitting your ERAS application (re-applicants usually are because of letters of recommendation) but try to have your NRMP profile ready as soon as ranking opens. You don't have to rank the programs at that time, just have your account created and ready to be ranked.

 

[mcl]

Thank you for sharing your experience, and a huge CONGRATULATIONS!!! on your Match this year!

 

[Fahim]

Does anyone knows 2018 Pathology unfilled programs for soap? Thank you!

 

[moyamoya6]

Does anyone knows 2018 Pathology unfilled programs for soap? Thank you!

 

[2021Doctor]

View attachment 253248

Is that unfilled percent the percent of unfilled residency slots or percent of unfilled residency programs?

 

[GoSpursGo]

Is that unfilled percent the percent of unfilled residency slots or percent of unfilled residency programs?

You're misreading it. The first column is the total number of slots available in the match, the second column is the number of unfilled slots, and the last column is the % of total slots filled.

EDIT: Given that match day 2019 is now here, I'm going to lock this thread and move subsequent posts to a new thread.