This Goodwill smells funny. It’s the weekend before my first residency interview, and I’m in Jacksonville, Florida during one of my audition rotations. I’m in need of a suit jacket; I just need something that looks good on Zoom—not in real life. I come across a decent looking $2 jacket. A few days later, I throw on that jacket and log into my first interview with an interesting Family Medicine program in Chicago, and voila—the rest is history.
As a first year resident, I expect to have a limited influence on residency interviews; however, I think I learned a thing or two about interviewing for residency. In a short few hours, you will be able to understand whether a program is right for you, just like a residency will be able to figure out if you are right for their program. Here are some ways that you can get the most out of your residency interviews.
MAKE A NOTE OF WHO YOU ARE INTERVIEWING WITH
“Our biggest strength is our people.” Get ready to hear that. A lot. To my surprise, however, some residency programs swing-and-miss when it comes to who you are interviewing with. You should expect to interview with the Program Director. Boom, done. You should expect to interview with other members of the full-time faculty. That’ll hopefully happen. But if you are interviewing with non-clinical staff—the program coordinator being the exception—that should set off a few alarm bells. I don’t think anyone is above speaking to non-clinical staff, but with a limited amount of interview slots available, that’s a missed opportunity to interact with a faculty member or current resident.
HOW DO THE RESIDENTS SPEAK ABOUT THEIR PROGRAM
Being a doctor has been your goal for a long time. Specifically, being an attending physician has been your career goal. Buuuuut you are applying to be a resident, so you should carefully comb through your interactions with the current residents to see whether they like their jobs. The green flags: residents are smiling, they like the location of their program, and they consider their hours to be reasonable. Red flags: they admit they probably work more hours on average than residents at other programs, they don’t seem to like each other, and most of them want to leave the area once they finish residency.
COME UP WITH SOME THOUGHT-PROVOKING QUESTIONS
Just like any other interview, your interviewers will expect you to have some questions. Coming up with specific, unique questions about every program you interview definitely grows harder as interview fatigue sets in (it also doesn’t help that most programs have limited information on their websites). However, you should have some absolute fastballs in your arsenal. Here are two of my favorite open-ended questions:
“What does your program do well that you think it doesn’t get enough credit for?”
I love this question more than I love my kids. Just kidding—I don’t have any kids yet. But listen, if you are passionate about your job, doing your job well, or being a part of a successful organization, there is definitely something that you wish you and your team received more recognition for. I’m not asking anyone to be outright salty. Rather, I want to hear people being reflective about their work.
“As a medical student, I have seen first hand how much interns rely on their senior residents to teach them about the service they are currently on. The current second year residents would be my senior residents. How would you describe your second year class?”
BOOM. This isn’t your typical “how would you describe your residents?”. This is essentially, “so you keep telling me you guys are like family…name some of the residents in this specific class and tell me what you like about them.” You’d be surprised how difficult this is for faculty at some programs. If you sense the interviewer being taken aback by this question, that should tell you that maybe a faculty member doesn't like their residents or that they are distant from them.
GET THE DEETS
I’ve already written in the past that I think audition rotations are a bit overhyped; however, being involved in the program before you apply would help you understand the aspects of your future job that would make you feel comfortable. If you don’t have that opportunity, you should get the answers to some boring–yet important–questions. My hospital has a cafeteria with really good food. I get a $200 stipend every month towards the cafeteria and hospital Starbucks. I have free parking. I get my own call room when on night shift, and my program just moved into a very spacious lounge and workroom within the hospital. On the inpatient Medicine service, we admit patients from our own practice—we rarely get hit with patients we don’t know. We will respond to rapid responses and code blues in the hospital, but we won’t get called upon to take care of someone else’s patient in the middle of night for insomnia or foot pain.
These details are huge. You could be interviewing at a program that requires you to pay for hospital parking, the food is terrible, and there are only bunk beds in a small call room for night shift. I can’t stress enough how problematic and burdensome it could potentially be to become quasi-involved in the care of someone else’s patient in the middle of the night. For rapid responses, I think our involvement as residents is both crucial and a great learning experience, but for the patient you don’t know anything about and there’s some non-emergent issue, get their own doctor involved. You should know about these details before you rank programs.
STAY CALM
There is a lot of potential to get thrown off your game in your interviews and resident meet-and-greets. You should have an overall expectation that something can be said or done that could catch you off-guard. Heck, most programs are doing a “hybrid” approach to interviews, where distant applicants may Zoom, but local applicants can show up for in-person interviews. That’s awkward. Anyways, one of your co-interviewees may act like he’s a complete homie with the residents just because he did an audition rotation at the program last month. Perhaps an interviewer will make a remark about your appearance. Maybe someone that you’re interviewing with is from your hometown or went to your college. Or maybe the interview becomes really formal and filled with lots of awkward pauses. Handle the unpredictability with grace. Smile. You got this.
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