Use all the free resources available to you from SDN: articles, guides, expert advising, forums discussions, and school research.
There's also the issue that we/SDN could not (and not for lack of trying) get any reasonable number of students/residents to even write reviews. Too paranoid that any negative comments would be traced back to them. We offered to post them anonymously but still no takers.
Can't some boards do it where they PM their residency review to the moderator of that board so they can paste it?
Again...individual forums have this kind of thing set up and there are usually mods and regular users who offer to post anonymously and it's still pretty rare that it happens. And again, to use one specialty (mine) as an example there are over 400 IM programs out there. Even if we were to formally request people write reviews, we'd get at the most, 50 different programs. Then people would just bitch because the one program they wanted to know about wasn't on the list. Also, these things rapidly go out of date. If I'd written a review of my program at the end of my intern year, about the only thing that would have been the same 2 years later at the end of residency was that we rotated at the same 2 hospitals. Everything else: call structure, rotation distribution, PD, # of residents, etc; was different. So how is that even useful?
I personally have and received no response.
It's weird, they're still posting new reviews on the site... I suppose it could be automated, but they seem to have at least some minimal screening to avoid a preponderance of spam, so I think there has to be a person still paying attention to it...
Yes, those things change. I think most applicants realize that. I don't think things like program culture change as much as there is a lot of inertia. I think those things are more revealing in the reviews.
I don't think he wants to give it up just yet:
Perhaps although it's a bit unprofessional wouldn't you say to not answer your emails from a colleague? 😉I don't think he wants to give it up just yet:
http://lcs.mgh.harvard.edu/people/faculty.html
Adrian Zai, MD, PhD
Dr. Zai is an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His present research interests include chronic disease management and population disease management. His current projects include Registry Population Management (RPM) and Scutwork, a residency program review site.
http://lcs.mgh.harvard.edu/resources/poster-scutwork.pdf
Does that picture look like someone who wants to answer an email from the rest of us heathens not from Harvard? 😉
Well back in the day Dr Zai and I had a fair bit of communication so I'm not your average heathen. 😉 I assume my emails are going to his Junk Folder.
