thoughts on anesthesia away rotations?

[XRanger]

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I go to school in east coast and want to go to west coast programs. What do you guys think about doing 1 or 2 aways at some west coast programs? I think my stats are pretty competitive and people that Ive talked to have given me mixed opinions. The argument against doing aways are 1) if your stats are competitive, then you have more to lose since you probably would get interviews anyway without doing away and you'll be competing against their students who already know the system. 2) Other programs in the area will see that you rotate in that program and think that you want to go there and not to their programs so they don't rank you as high (is this true?)
so what do you think?

 

[El Dooderino]

If you have really good numbers and your only goal is matching at one of them then I'd probably not do it just because of the time, money, and chance of screwing something up. It's definitely not necessary to do aways at programs you want to match at. I think the biggest benefit of doing them is to see which program you'd rather match at. Also, if you're talking UCSF and Stanford they don't even give interviews to everyone who does an away there so be careful of that

 

[michigangirl]

The only other reason to do an away than what El Dooderino said is if you are limited to one city due to personal reasons (marriage, family, etc.) and there are only one or two programs that are desirable to you. For example, when I applied to residency-- there were six programs in the area my husband lived in for grad school- only two of which I would be happy at. I ranked all six out of absolute necessity but I would have been sorely disappointed if I hadn't matched at one of my top two. So I had to do an away to increase my chances-- knowing that if I didn't ROCK it it would probably hurt me.

So for your purposes, it's definitely not necessary if you have multiple great programs to potentially rank and strong stats. Good luck.

 

[dozitgetchahi]

I thought some of the reasoning behind doing aways was that if you wanted to apply to some programs far away from where you went to medical school, they would be less likely to rank you without an away rotation to show you were "serious" about moving there. Is there any truth to this?

 

[El Dooderino]

I thought some of the reasoning behind doing aways was that if you wanted to apply to some programs far away from where you went to medical school, they would be less likely to rank you without an away rotation to show you were "serious" about moving there. Is there any truth to this?

probably more true for lesser tier programs, the UCSF's and Stanfords know people are serious

 

[beardpapa]

The reason why the advice on this topic is so variable is because the combinations of "your competitiveness" + "program competitiveness" + "your personality" are numerous.

For example, if you are indeed competitive for the top programs in Cali (Stanford, UCSF, UCLA), you will not need to do an away at a less competitive program (UCI, USC, Harbor) to get into those programs. Your stellar application will undoubtedly score you an interview and hopefully you don't mess up your actual interview.

That being said, most everyone that matches at Stanford/UCSF will also have very competitive applications. Unless you scored a 270 to really set yourself apart, they'll probably view a 242 and a 252 similarly (eg. Wow this guy killed it). So this is where "your personality" comes into play. If you know how to play the social game, shmooze with the PD during your away without looking like you're just kissing a**, it would behoove you to do an away at these competitive programs. I would just imagine that when the committe is ranking applicants, if they come across 2 nice interviewees but 1 one was also an away rotator, their perception of the rotator actually being a nice guy and pleasant to work with would be all the more strong.

Another situation that this can help in is if you are somewhat competitive and your personality can push you over the edge positively. How can you gauge if you will do well on an away? My advice is to look at your 3rd year clerkship CLINICAL (non-Shelf) grades and the comments. If you are consistently killing these areas, I think you can be pretty sure you'd do well on an away.

Hope this helps. This was mostly based on my own experience.

 

[XRanger]

Thanks for all the advice. Currently without knowing the programs and based on location alone, I prefer to match in socal, so would rather go to ucla/usc/uci/ucsd as opposed to ucsf/stanford. And just to get into more specifics, I have step 1 in the 240s, grades are mostly HPs and few non-anesthesia research. At this point, im leaning towards not doing aways.
btw if anyone did aways at some of the cali programs, feel free to comment about your experience