WAMC Psych Research Track residency

[psychy22]

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Hope this is the right place. MD-PhD student finalizing my ERAS application and my program list is pretty small, I'm mainly looking at places with consistently high-impact research (currently only 15 programs, basically the ones you would expect, no real geographic preference). I think I have a strong application but I want to be certain.
School: T10 according to USNews lol
Step1/2: 260/266
Clinical grades: 4/7 Honors (including psych, medicine, ambulatory care), rest HP
Publications: 1 first author Cell/Nature/Science paper from my PhD. 1 lit review submitted. 1 small 1st author from undergrad, and 3 mid-author pubs from my gap year. All in neuroscience. I think they tell a cohesive story.
Experiences: Some leadership positions in mentorship/community service organizations
LORs: 2 psych attending I worked closely with, 1 medicine attending, 1 from PhD advisor

Will I be getting interviews at these top places or am I being too confident? I really want research to be a central part of my career so I just can't see myself wanting to train at smaller programs without very strong neuroscience faculty.

 

[phonyreal98]

Competitive? Yes, you'll likely get interviews at a lot of the top research places in the country. I had much worse med school stats than you but a similar research profile when I applied about 3-4 years ago and interviewed at Pitt, Yale, UCSD, WashU etc for their research tracks.

What I would recommend though, is that if you haven't already done this, is looking at some mid-range programs that are strong in your particular areas of interest. I imagine that with your experiences, you have fairly well developed research interests and a particular direction that you want to go in. The thing that sets apart the top psych departments in research is not that they're doing better quality research than mid-tier places, but they have a much wider net of investigators doing quality research (and then resulting in more research money).

You should also cross-post in the psychiatry message board and see what they say.