Taking a year off - advice needed

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I applied for and matched in an Internal Medicine program that is not quite ideal for me. In addition, I had thought about looking into Emergency Medicine in the past, but only now have I had the opportunity to do a rotation in it and absolutely love it...to the point I am thinking I should have tried to match in Emergency Medicine in the first place. (I had liked IM, but it always seemed kind of a default for me.)

Now given the position I am in with the match and being at a location that is not where I had hoped, I am thinking about not graduating with my MD this year (that is, finish the one remaining rotation in May or June in order to graduate "next year") so that 1) I would be able to take a year off and either do research and reapply for the match in the following year, or 2) do a second MPH in another focus area during this upcoming year and again reapply for the match. Has anyone had any similar experiences or can anyone offer any advice?

 

[civic4982]

You're in a contract with the NRMP to accept the matched location. Good luck getting out of that unscathed.

You should do your intern year then reapply for EM during that year. Sounds like you have some buyer's remorse on the location on top of everything and perhaps ranking that program wasn't the best idea. Hopefully you can take that away with you the next time you make a rank order list.

Better yet you may be able to get an out of the match spot at an EM residency when you apply next year and I'm sure a lot of your rotations may get you credit.

 

[4thyeartoIM]

Normally I am just a reader of this forum but thought this post was similar to a friends story so I thought I would share.
A friend in last years graduating class waited to graduate so that he "opted out" of his contract unscathed. In his case, he was applying for med/peds but also ranked some regular peds programs. Apparently he was ranked with some POS program (in his eyes) that does not have a med/peds program. He did research over the interim, reapplied to med/peds this year and got a pretty nice program.
Not sure how useful this is, but hope it helps.
Good luck!

 

[matchquestion]

Normally I am just a reader of this forum but thought this post was similar to a friends story so I thought I would share.
A friend in last years graduating class waited to graduate so that he "opted out" of his contract unscathed. In his case, he was applying for med/peds but also ranked some regular peds programs. Apparently he was ranked with some POS program (in his eyes) that does not have a med/peds program. He did research over the interim, reapplied to med/peds this year and got a pretty nice program.
Not sure how useful this is, but hope it helps.
Good luck!

I tried PMing you about this and I don't think it's working for some reason. Can you PM me the details of this and how it happened? How did he just decide to wait to graduate an extra year? Did he get a waiver? This wasn't a match violation?

 

[Buzz Me]

Why did you rank a program you wouldn't want to go to? 😕