This is the moment your whole medical school career has been hinging upon:
It is time to get serious and come up with a rank list that maximizes your chances of getting your first choice residency. Ranking programs is a personal decision making process, because everyone has different priorities and life circumstances. Therefore, no one piece of advice applies to everyone. This is a run down of my own personal thoughts of what is important.
One of the most helpful articles I’ve encountered on teaching oral clinical presentations in the ED is a paper from Academic EM in 2008. It summarizes how to teach the “3-minute EM student presentation.”
Are you a medical student interested in EM? Want to get your registration costs waived at a national meeting? Want to come say hi to me? Here is an announcement from the SAEM website (deadline Feb 1, 2012):
Don’t try to navigate medical school and residency on your own.
This is key especially during medical school as you try to get through and around the mounds of reading, paperwork, options, and pitfalls. If you are interested in Emergency Medicine (EM) as a career, that means getting one or several great EM advisors. Don’t rely on non-EM faculty to give you any insight into EM. Inevitably, I have found that they give incomplete or slightly skewed perspectives about the pros and cons of EM.
As a followup to a previous post on “The 10 Commandments in Emergency Medicine”, we would like to pay tribute to our pediatric friends. More than a decade after it was initially published, Timothy Givens (also from Vanderbilt but the pediatric side) published “The 10 commandments of pediatric Emergency Medicine”. Although the original commandments still hold true, the pediatric commandments augment them nicely and are geared towards our littler patients.
“Your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound reinvention.”
“No specific job or career goal defines me, and it should not define you.”
— Conan O’Brien
I found this inspirational 2011 graduation speech by Conan O’Brien at Dartmouth College. It is a great mix of silly, witty, inspirational, and profound. Check it out. For those in Medicine and medical training, your dreams may change over time… and that’s ok.