To rank med or to not rank med

[EM OR BUST]

That is my question. My EM rank list is very short, and I applied to Internal med as a backup. I thought I would be fine doing med, but after going to the interviews i realized I HATE IT. I can now say if I end up in med I will hate life. But the scramble dosent look too fun, and im not sure if I wanna deal with it. any advice? I have 24hrs to decide!!

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[WallowaWanderer]

I guess on nice thing about the scramble is the Chattanooga program. But that's a risk as there will be a lot of people trying to get in to that program.

I guess you have to decide if not ranking Medicine programs is worth the risk of scrambling. That's a tough one.

 

[GatorDoc77]

Well I would really not want to scramble if I were you but I also wouldn't want to do 3 years of something I didn't like. What was it about medicine that you didn't like all of a sudden? I mean, did you do a sub-I in medicine and see things you didn't know about? I personally think medicine is great, just not as great as emergency medicine. If you don't match EM you can always take a year off, do something for a year, and then reapply next year. Good luck to you.

 

[dmitrinyr]

EM or BUST, I'm in the same boat as you. I also have a limited amount of EM ranks and so I had to go on IM interviews as backups. I ended up ranking IM prelims after all of my EM programs because I don't want to scramble and with a prelim I can try to reapply to EM next year (worst case scenario). I agree that scrambling for UT Chattanooga is an option but there will be such a great competition for those 6 spots that you should not see this as a strong option. Good luck.

 

[EM_Rebuilder]

If you want to do Emergency Medicine and would be unhappy elsewhere, rank only EM. In the rare chance you scramble, do you best to get one of the 'new program' spots, otherwise, find the best IM Preliminary year that is open and then reapply next year.

It would be MUCH hard to do a year of catagorical medicine, re-affirm you HATE it, then try to apply out to EM. It has to do with funding, but your funding would be wasted and thats another black mark against you. See other threads for the specifics on funding...

Good Luck...