Tips for those starting PSTPs

[StilgarMD]

So I've been really fortunate and ended up matching to a great Psychiatry PSTP. I've spoken to a few mentors on tips for transitioning well, and how to best take advantage of what research time is available early on (Not much, but some). Seems like a delicate dance between actually learning to be a physician and getting your barrings in a new research environment, especially if you aren't continuing on the work you did during your PhD. Any advice for incoming PSTP interns?

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[SurfingDoctor]

-When time is short and resources are limited, always look for the LPU (least publishable unit).

-At the end of the day, the person most invested in your career and academic success, is you.

 

[Fencer]

Congrats on the journey.... The most common situation is that you learn how to be a doctor during internship, and you start considering case reports and/or research areas in PGY2. In PGY3 and 4 for Psychiatry, you should try to complete a simple clinical project, typically cross-sectional and/or observational. PSTPs are quite different from each other. In some, one month research elective (80% FTE) in PGY2 for identifying research mentor and overall area, PGY3 another month for formulating the question, and PGY4 up to 10 months of doing the research (80% FTE). The 20% is often being on-call, longitudinal clinics and didactics. A 2-3 year fellowship is needed for academic psychiatrists with kind of a similar path leading to a K08/K23 application at the end.
Best of luck!

 

[tr]

Congrats!!! 🥂

Echo Fencer but just to add, psych internship is less intense than medicine/neuro and your psych months will probably be relatively reasonable in terms of workload. I'd use whatever spare time you can eke out during your intern year to put out feelers and try to identify a mentor you'd like to work with. If you can get that sorted by the beginning of PGY2 you'll be ahead of the game.

Depending on your program's structure you should be able to find at least a little bit of time in PGY2, and more in PGY3 and 4, to develop and work on a contained project. If you can aim to have some solid results on that by the time you finish residency, at the end of PGY4 you can go on a T32 research fellowship and spend most of that time preparing a K application.

 

[solitude]

-At the end of the day, the only person invested in your career and academic success, is you.

fixed it for you.

 

[SurfingDoctor]

fixed it for you.

Generally, yeah. You might find someone who hopes you succeed too though, they just won’t offer much beyond that.

And in their defense, I get it. I have tried to actually help a good number of people and they are either ungrateful or don’t care. After that happening enough times, you are kinda left with indifference.

Fundamentally, I think the only difference between those who succeed and those who don’t are the ones who want to enough and are persistent at playing the game because they want to win.

 

[StilgarMD]

Thank you @Fencer and @tr! Your messages on this board have been really helpful getting me through the last 10 years of training (and the preceding application season, of course).

The notes on time are well taken, It was definitely a factor and fortunately I'm going to be at a program that offers a cumulative ~3 months in the first 2 years. I picked the program with an eye toward a few possible mentors and they have good track records with trainees. Thanks to all for the input everyone.