10 Tips to Become a Successful Interviewer: Do’s and Don’ts

As fall approaches, senior medical students and Emergency Medicine (EM) residency programs alike are beginning to prepare for the upcoming interview season. As part of the process, many programs have current residents interview potential candidates – their future colleagues! For most residents, though they have often been the interviewee, this is the first time they have filled the role of the interviewer. Among all the busy shifts and learning everything you need to know to be an amazing EM physician, there is little time for practice or formal training. To help, we have compiled our top “10 Tips to Become a Successful Interviewer.” Here’s to making this interview season the best one yet!

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By Meg Pusateri, MD|2016-10-26T17:04:15-07:00Sep 15, 2016|Medical Education|

IDEA Series: An Asynchronous Curriculum for the Resident as Teacher

The Problem

While residents may accumulate teaching tips and techniques during the course of their training by observing their mentors at work, learning how to educate while balancing the needs of a busy emergency department (ED) is a difficult skill to acquire. Unfortunately, excellent clinical skills do not always equate to effective teaching skills. With training, however, even the initially reluctant teacher can begin to effectively engage learners in the ED. An elective aimed toward developing the resident as a teacher allows residents to acquire and practice skills that will be particularly helpful for those that ultimately take on academic roles with teaching requirements.

As dedicated faculty time was in limited supply, our previous Resident As Teacher elective simply offered residents time to practice teaching with junior residents and medical students without offering significant structure or substance for those who wished to enhance their skillset as educators and acquire new knowledge.

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By Benjamin Schnapp, MD|2017-11-06T18:58:56-08:00Sep 9, 2016|IDEA series, Medical Education|

8 Tips on How to Succeed in Your EM Sub-Internship

This time of year is almost universally overwhelming for visiting medical students at away rotations. They are thrown into a new environment for a brief amount of time and there is a great deal of pressure to impress both faculty and residents. After years of hard work and study, these few weeks may be one of the most influential aspects of a residency application. A survey study of Emergency Medicine (EM) residency program directors by Crane et al. showed that EM rotation grade was the single most important factor in resident selection.¹

Given the importance of performing well on this rotation, how do you succeed? Or equally as important, how do you NOT fail? This blog post was developed as a culmination of advice from personal experiences combined with those of the ALIEM 2015-16 Chief Resident Incubator, a network of over 200 chief residents from 71 programs across the country. While some of these tips may appear obvious, the potential anxiety associated with this high-stakes rotation causes many of these issues to still occur every month at programs across the country. Follow this advice to demonstrate your best self and avoid the problems that may easily overshadow many others.

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By W. Gannon Sungar DO|2017-11-06T18:25:06-08:00Aug 12, 2016|Medical Education|

A Starter’s Roadmap to EM Resources: Books, Websites, and Apps

With the start of the year, we welcomed a new group of faces into our respective residency programs. We can all still remember how daunting it was to tackle learning the immense volume of material to be a great emergency medicine physician. We have so many amazing resources, but no road maps for where to start. The purpose of this list is to help guide the new interns as well as to highlight some resources that even the more seasoned clinician may find useful.

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By E. Liang Liu, MD|2019-04-07T01:31:19-07:00Aug 3, 2016|Medical Education, Social Media & Tech|

Using Slack for Residency Communication – Do’s and Dont’s

One of the most difficult parts of residency and medical education is coordination and communication. Often residents and faculty alike can be found drowning in a never ending onslaught of emails, with chains of projects getting buried amongst reply-all’s and attachments. Over the course of the past year, our residency program at Doctors Hospital-OhioHealth in Columbus, Ohio has been using a newer form of communication to facilitate the dissemination of information and collaboration as a group.

After some initial exploration into technology and apps, it was decided to try out the program called Slack. Designed to help large groups work together as well as separately on projects simultaneously, we felt this may be our solution to the clunky and at times unbearable onslaught of emails. For those of you interested in taking your residency or group to the next level, below are our observations from the past year in a simple do’s and dont’s fashion.

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By Tanner Gronowski, DO|2016-12-23T19:41:07-08:00Jul 29, 2016|Medical Education, Social Media & Tech|

MEdIC Series: Case of the Honorary Authorship – Expert Review & Curated Commentary

The Case of the Honorary Authorship outlined a scenario of a senior academic scientist interacting with two more junior researchers, raising issues around publication ethics and professionalism. This month the MEdIC team (Brent Thoma, Sarah Luckett-Gatopoulos, Tamara McColl, Eve Purdy, John Eicken, and Teresa Chan), hosted a discussion around these questions with insights from the ALiEM community. We are proud to present to you the Curated Community Commentary and our 2 expert opinions. Thank-you to all our participants for contributing to the very rich discussions last week.

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By Teresa Chan, MD|2016-12-20T11:51:44-08:00Jul 22, 2016|MEdIC series, Medical Education|

Escaping Addiction with Dignity as a Medical Student

“The most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” –David Foster Wallace

Addiction can be a nightmare of isolation and shame, but it doesn’t have to be.

I will always remember my last night of withdraw; sitting in the busy waiting room of my training hospital. I kept thinking about what might happen if one of my EM attendings were to care for me. To see me sick, weak, and vulnerable. Nobody other than my family knew I struggled with alcohol abuse, and I was exhausted with the neverending cycle of trying to manage addiction on my own. This had to stop.

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By Luke Collins, MA|2018-10-28T21:25:46-07:00Jul 12, 2016|Medical Education|