OT: Medical School Match Day
I hope that this is not too OT for the board today but good luck to all of the Michigan Medical Students who have their match day today at noon. All the hard work by these individuals will finally be realized when they match for residency. I have been looking forward to this day for fiance to match for months now. We are hoping to match here at Michigan!
Good luck and GO BLUE!
[EDIT]- My fiance matched here at Michigan!
How many do you rank? Do you get responses to all the programs you applied to, or are you shown only the best ranked match? Appreciate your clarity.
March 20th, 2015 at 11:04 AM ^
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March 20th, 2015 at 11:14 AM ^
That said, being from Michigan, getting into med school was challenging. Didn't interview at U of M, didn't like Wayne that much, and didn't want to go to MSU. Then you have Ohio which has a ton of schools all in-state heavy. Makes it tough in the state of Michigan relatively.
March 20th, 2015 at 11:22 AM ^
Funding for residency spots comes from Medicare via Graduate Medical Education funding...and the federal government matches every dollar a state spends on GME. But GME is in the discretionary funding portion of states' Medicare allotment, and Michigan wants to divert the funding elsewhere. They are cutting around $120 million total, which will equate to about $240 million lost from funding residency spots.
Their proposal is to tax hospitals and use that tax to fund residency spots. Essentially, the current situation is that the government pays hospitals to train residents. Now, Michigan wants hospitals to pay to train residents (ie pay to teach).
All this is coming at a time when Michigan opened 3 new medical schools under the faulty assumption that this would create new doctors in Michigan--faulty because you can't create new doctors without creating new residency spots. Instead what it is doing is ruining a 100 or more people's financial futures every year.
I know nothing about this and appreciate your insights. Are they slashing the funding because they feel tax payers are paying to train doctors that inevitably flee the State of Michigan? I know brain drain is a huge, huge problem in Michigan. Or do they feel hospitals are incredibly profitable and can eat this training? Please elab on this. Fascinating stuff. Thanks.
Also, do you feel Western, Central and Oakland's Medical Schools are a good thing or bad? I think Oakland's the first one with a match day? How did they do? Are there other potential Medical Schools opening?
Politicians are suspicious of how the hospitals use the money, because a lot of it goes to overhead and they don't have to explicitly state how they allocate the funds. Another possible issue (this is just heresay from the lobbyists that work for Wayne State and teach a program on medical politics at the medical school) is that doctors aren't as politically engaged as other professions, so their interests get drowned out by the relatively strong lobbyists of nurse practioners, physician assistants, etc.
I think that opening more medical schools in Michigan (and increasing class sizes at existing schools) is short-sighted as long as there is a nationwide cap on residency spots.
So when OU, CMU and WMU are all mature, how many MDs will they be pumping out per year? You're telling me the residencies had been flat year over year in Michigan? You expect no change next year too? So did a lot of OU (I think that's the first to graduate a class) get no-matches, or are there X (x = # in OU's class) amount of newly minted MDs that are forced to go out of state for their residency?
March 21st, 2015 at 10:25 AM ^
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Roughly how many total residency spots are avail state-wide each year in Michigan?
March 20th, 2015 at 11:17 AM ^
It;s like if CFB teams had a draft, taking into acount players preferences.
This is the only grad/ post grad system where the applicant has no say in which program to choose. It's awful and archaic. Maybe there should be some outrage over this?
Nah, I care more about a random Iowa QB to "earn" a grad degree as a 5th year scholarship guy.
Horrible system. It sucks, nobody cares enough to change. Good luck to M Grads!
March 20th, 2015 at 11:29 AM ^
Honestly, the whole medical education system sucks. You undergo 4 years of grueling schoolwork, train another 3-7 years earning a salary well below what others w/grad degrees earn (while being treated worse) and leave with a huge amount of debt. If the tech industry was booming at the level it is now, there's no way I would have went into medicine. The best college students in America will run away from the field for better prospects.
March 20th, 2015 at 11:42 AM ^
Add in that you can be fired at any time for even the most trivial reason during training and your career is essentially ruined. But you still owe back all of that student loan money.
For anyone who doesn't know residency/fellowship is a series of one year contracts that can be non-renewed for just about any stupid reason you can think of... some places have resident unions that can protect you a bit and some places have a strong GME dept that might help but most don't.
We had no idea about anything related to medical training/school before my wife went through it. If you wanted a system that takes potentially compassionate/selfless doctors and crushes all compassion/selflessness out of them this is it! Well done American medical training!
I don't know, doctors are community leaders, earn very comfortable pay, very high occupational prestige. "Bullying" is an issue during M1-M4 and into residency, for sure -- but young lawyers, consultants and finance grads are bullied too, are they not? Computer programmers are well comped but treated like slaves.
March 20th, 2015 at 12:03 PM ^
I did the match 25 years ago and fortunately managed to get my first choice. I now sit on a residency committee and interview and rank med student applicants every year. I agree that the match feels arbitrary and can be a very vexing, often expensive, and nerve-racking experience that can result in great highs or utter disappointment. I remember some med school classmates being devistated that they matched a thousand miles away from where they wanted to settle down, or not match into the field they wanted.
Now being on the other side of the ranking system my colleagues and I are often amused by the number of interviewing applicants that are clearly using us as practice for later more coveted programs, cancel an hour before the interview session, or tell us how much they want to join our program only for us to find out that the matched in a completely different field of study. The interview system for us also lasts months and takes a lot of our time we could be doing patient-care or teaching.
At least the match is supposed to be more slanted to the applicants than the programs' ranking compared to decades ago. I know that not every resident who joins our program had us listed in their top couple choices. We work hard to make their time with us productive, happy, and resulting in successful board accrediation and acreers.
I am not at all perturbed that neither of my kids did not choose medicine as a career. Many of my residents have 200-400K in debt after 6 years of post-grad training. I remember being elated that after med school I could finally read a novel instead of a textbook. You really have a have a passion for your area of study, a thick hide, and acceptance of greatly delayed gratification.
I tell my students that all the time: unless you are ready to endure a potentially nightmarish half-decade as slave labor in a location that you may hate, stay away from becoming a physician. But if you do have an undeniable passion for it, then go for it.
It is not a good process for many reasons, imo.
Dude, it's rude to assume that I don't know what I'm talking about. Please consider the following:
a) I know exactly what I'm talking about. My wife is a physician and I've been with her every step of the way. So is my father (UM med school, in fact). So are some of my former students.
b) If you re-read my post, you'll see that I do advise kids to pursue the career if they have an undeniable passion for it.
c) I constantly tell kids to get all the facts and not to listen to me, any other teacher, any person, or any source of any kind exclusively.
I'm glad you're enjoying your medical career. I'm sure that we can agree that we all want our kids to grow up happy.
Meh.
Work hours are limited to 80 hours, if you pull an overnighter, you had to be out of the hospital by 12PM the next day.
You are in your 20s (for the most part) so it is pretty easy to do. The hard part is being expected to continue to study once you get home while working.
But residents make a solid amount of money (UMich PGY1 (PostGraduate Year1 aka interns) make $53K plus a good benefit package.
Granted, this was 10 years ago, but myself, and Dr/Mrs gopoohgo were able to afford a pretty expensive townhome, car in Michigan.
And the work environment makes you a sponge; it is really amazing how much you pick up when immersed in that kind of environment
Whoa whoa whoa, you think the 80 hour limit matters? Sure, maybe you get sent home from the OR after 80 hours in a week...but then you have to go home and read for 2-3 hours a night too. (this from my ortho friend PGY1)
You kids.
Ever work a hundred hour week? I have, it sucks. Working 20 hours less than that per week makes an 80 hour week childs play.
I'm a physician; I know exactly how fun it is working an 80 week, then having to study on top of things for boards. And yes, the 80 work week matters. GME offices, various medical boards are very cognizant of exactly how many hours residents work after the Libby Zion case.
Especially after ACGME cracked down on Hopkins.
Even surgery at Detroit Receiving tried to comply with the 80 hour work week.
There are countless ways around hour limits. Much of it depends on the program and the program director. Some are great; some are not.
"greatly delayed gratification" IMO the key to success in life, period.
March 20th, 2015 at 11:29 AM ^
Hope your fiance gets that coveted derm residency! If I kill step maybe I'll join you guys in a couple of years...
March 20th, 2015 at 11:52 AM ^
March 20th, 2015 at 11:52 AM ^
My match year here at U of M about 10 people somehow got left out of the match (some sort of computer glitch). At the end of the ceremony where everbody gets their results, these 10 people don't have any results. They had to rerun the entire match program adding in these 10 folks to see where they would have gone and then they had to pay hospitals to fund their slots. What a cluster fuck
March 20th, 2015 at 11:55 AM ^
March 20th, 2015 at 12:23 PM ^
Can anyone explain this process to me in simple terms. I'm about to take the MCAT in a month so I still have a ways to go but some insight from people who've gone through it would be great.
Also, any general advice would be helpful. Thanks
March 20th, 2015 at 12:38 PM ^
from an M2:
Make sure you really really want to be a doctor before you commit yourself to this madness. Really wish I had considered dental school (I'm sure there are many problems in that field too, but the grass really does seem greener on that side).
That being said, get everything prepared for applications as soon as you. You should send out your primaries the first day it opens, and send out the secondaries as soon as humanly possible. I got interviews at a couple really good schools that I applied to the quickest and didn't get interviews at other worse schools because I didn't send the apps out in a timely fashion.
When it comes to picking schools, consider cost. I got into UVa but chose Wayne. Will end up saving at least $100K.
Finally, once you get in, if classes are anything like Wayne, a lot of the content is useless trash. Focus on the big picture material from day 1. You'll look like a douchebag for pulling out Step study books as a first year, but it's the biggest test of your life (like MCAT but twice as important) because it will determine what specialty you can realistically get into. Wish I had been studying for this exam for the last two years. Instead, I've been doing well in classes, which is great and all, but residencies won't care at all.
March 20th, 2015 at 12:55 PM ^
C'mon man nothing douchey about pulling out First Aid 1st year ;D As you said most of 1st year curruculum is useless trash, so it's a good resource to stay focused on most important material.
BTW: Good luck on boards! Coming up real quick!
March 20th, 2015 at 12:51 PM ^
Everything Tai said but don't choose Wayne. LOL Wayne prepares you to be a great doctor, but it is a hellish and outdated curriculum. I have many classmates that go there/recently graduated and they have not changed their curruculum since like 1970 and it's very disadvantageous for students. While you may not be completely happy in any medical school, you can almost guarantee misery going there if overwhelming precedent holds. Do good on your MCAT (obvs), turn in your apps ASAP (rolling admissions). Have knowledgable people proofread your personal statement. I think honestly my PS is why I got interviews with pretty mediocre/below average stats.
In general, if you have options, really look into how curruclum is set up at that school and compare it to what you know as your ideal style of learning. I cannot stress this enough: you want to find the best place FOR YOU, not what US News and World reports. Also, I agree with Tai in that if you're torn between two programs, pick the cheaper one.
-(1st year DO student)
March 20th, 2015 at 12:59 PM ^
I have never heard anything bad about Wayne...in fact, I know it is a great place to train during medical school. Your patients exhibit a more broad disease spectrum with advanced stages of disease due to the economic make-up of the Detroit area. Great training atmosphere for young docs...
Wayne's basic sciences curriculum is embarrassingly bad. These 2 years have been a parade of clowishly bad teaching, organization, etc.
That being said, I chose Wayne because, like you said, the patient population here is second to none. On top of that, if you do rotations at DMC, you will be thrown into the lion's den and asked to do things that no other M3s will be doing.
I should've put a caveat in there that it is a very good school and you're right about the patient population allowing for great clinical experience. However, if you've never heard anything bad I question how many Wayne students you know! lol I'm only speaking from the 30-40 friends and classmates who have attended or are currently in the program now compared to my friends at other schools with more updated curriculums.
my wife is alumni of their med program...graduated last year...so I know hundereds. lol All programs have issues, but I don't know anyone who has had a bad experience overall there.
Wayne's schedule and curric. makes it really hard to blow Step1 out of the water.
Had friends who had a full month to study for Step 1 baked into their schedule.
At the same time, I think the rotations trained me to be a fantastic clinician.
That, and Wayne was $12K/year when I started many moons ago....
Good luck to any M4s out there! (although you are all probably blotto at this point).
FWIW I skipped our match ceremony to goto SXSW in Austin. Found out in the lobby of our hotel that I matched at my #1 (UMich Hospitals)...woot.
Thanks for the advice guys, I really appreciate it. I'm a first generation immigrant so no one in my family has gone through this process. I basically have to rely on google for most of my info.
Dare I advise you to venture thorugh the SDN forum: http://forums.studentdoctor.net You can search for advice on application process, and connect with current medical students all across the land! It was a useful albeit big time-wasting resource that helped me a lot in applying. Also if you have a health professions advisor on campus, ask them for help on the basic stuff. They might not have a ton of knowledge about specific programs, but they can help you throughout the daunting application process. Good luck to you!
it will look good on applications and it is the only way to really get insight into what your life could look like. shadow a lot, and see as much different stuff as you can. if you're at uofm, my experience was that doctors there were really awesome and open to having undergrads come in.
March 20th, 2015 at 12:33 PM ^
I remember match day as being fairly stressful for most folks. I was lucky in that I already knew where I was headed. Congrats to all and get ready for the only legalized form of slavery left in the US - residency.
Apparently you've never been an analyst at an investment bank.......
$21k a year to work 60 hours a week 51 weeks a year.
March 20th, 2015 at 12:35 PM ^
I have a friend who just got into his 1A choice residency. Any ideas on what to get him? I was thinking whiskey, but if there is something residents present or pass can reccomend, that would be cool.
March 20th, 2015 at 12:40 PM ^
If he doesn't have a good steth, get him a customized LIttman Cardio stethoscope (there are a couple diferent versions but they are all very good). Those are considered one of the top brands but they are around $150-$200. Otherwise his favorite alcoholic beverage of choices is always welcome.
March 20th, 2015 at 12:44 PM ^
He got a stethescope from his Dad when he go into med school. He can never have too much scotch, though.
Don't get him a stethoscope if he got an orthopaedic residency. No need for a flea collar there.
Many medical students are binge drinkers.