Help for every stage of your veterinary career
During M&M rounds, we will examine some fictitious cases and evaluate the facts and consider some solutions to these problems. Mark Ashes is a 32-year-old Hispanic male presenting for not matching to an exotics/wildlife medicine specialty for the third time through the VIRMP. He has wanted to be a veterinarian being paid to work with
Selecting a residency program is an important decision. You will be there for at least three years, and suffering through a bad fit for that long is not pleasant. What you could tolerate for a year in an internship becomes intolerable over three years. Moreover, the program has to prepare you to successfully to and
The purpose of a residency is to prepare you to pass boards and train you to be a specialist clinician. As long as you achieve that objective, then the residency is a success. However, residencies are 2-4 years long, and you don’t want to suffer for that long if you work somewhere terrible. These are
I think it is surprisingly easy to get yourself flagged as “not rankable” for an internship or residency. Most application evaluators maintain a “veto” system for applicants. Any evaluator can veto any applicant for any reason. Particularly for residents, NO ONE wants a resident whom one of the mentors does not want to work with.
I am NOT talking about managing sex workers. In 1989, Dr. Brancati published a tongue-in-cheek article in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled “The Art of Pimping”. It is a true classic which I think anyone bound to be a specialist would enjoy. Pimping is the term used when the senior clinician asks
Applying for an internship or residency can be stressful. Ideally, you made decisions throughout vet school to improve your chances, and hopefully you have followed the suggestions I have on how to be successful. You have asked for letters of recommendation, which are probably the most important part of your application packet. But what do
Every now and then, I review letters of intent from intern or resident applicants that have something along the lines of, “When I was a student, I regularly worked 80-hour shifts,” or “When I was an intern, I often did 14-day-long shifts.” I understand, working that much is ridiculous. Being able to do it successfully
Choosing a residency program is a fairly important decision. You will be there for at least 3 years, so you want to make sure you find the best fit for you. I’ve talked before about what to look for in a residency, but how do you find that information? I have four simple sources of
I originally thought of this as the top 5 reasons to do a residency, but there’s really only one reason to do a residency: to become a specialist. So I thought I would focus on the end goal instead. 1) You want different intellectual challenges. I think it is easy for people to assume that
This post was by request from an experienced clinician who is seeking more tips to improve giving feedback to advanced clinicians-in-training. I don’t really have all the answers, but here are some ideas I hope will help. First, effective feedback has three fundamental requirements: it has to be timely, it has to be specific, and