When is the best time to start doing research in order to apply for a GI fellowship? I will be an incoming intern and am uncertain about when to schedule time for research or how to integrate it into my schedule. Is research always a requirement for a GI fellowship?
This is always a difficult question. I echo the suggestions of others: get involved with research early, and have something to show for it by the end of your intern year, because applications go in at the beginning of your R2 year. If you're aiming for a conference presentation, then you don't even have that long, because the deadline for sending in abstracts falls towards the middle of the year.
If this seems like a ridiculously tall task, it is. You're going to be working 80-100 hours a week on your ward months, and you've got to be a fairly driven
beast if you're going to get much done on your 4 days off per month.
Alternatively, you could plan on applying for GI fellowship at the beginning of your R3 year. Then instead of feeling the pressure to produce some scholarly work at the end of your intern year, you would have until the end of your R2 year to produce it.
Obviously this would set you back one year and you would need to figure out what to do in the year after you finish residency. That could include locum tenens work, a chief residency year, being a hospitalist for a nonteaching service (e.g., autoconsults to neurosurgery, heart failure service, whatever arrangement your institution has), or even taking a year for doing research full time +/- some miscellaneous moonlighting. Often you will not be able to have your post-residency year plans settled that far in advance, so this strategy will probably require a higher tolerance for uncertainty than the usual track.
-AT.
but unfortunately having a hard time narrowing things down!
