Question???

the fairs around my school are usually non-surgical, but we usually go anyway for free food and pens. (sad but true) given the opportunity, i'm sure most of us would go to a fair for our specialty to actually get info, not just free stuff. that being said, i don't know how much it sways an applicant except to maybe to put smaller, less known programs on the radar. the personality, presentation, and trinkets you have to present your program with do make a difference, though. i actually thought about other specialties (for about 2 seconds) because the residents at a fair were so cool.

firegirl

I don't know about all the other people on here, but I would definitely attend Residency Fairs if they were available for ortho. I think it owuld be a good way to find out about some of the programs we all know very little about.

I have to admit that this is one part of ortho that I do not like. This we are so desired and competitive that we dont have to do anything to help or promote ourselves to med students.

The overall mentality that we will have interviews on 1 day and if you cant come "screw u", and dont even think about having us pay for your hotel or anything like that. My friends in other specialties were given free hotels and even gifts on some inteviews. They also encountered a very flexible scheduling system and the programs also seemed very appreciative to have them come and interview...

Ortho programs by and large think that we are so greatful just to get an interview that they wouldn't need to do anything like promote their programs at a residency fair or help out some poor medical students with free hotels at interviews.

So its just simple market economics. The ortho programs are the sellers and there is less product than people who desire to comsume the product....which changes the roles of the consumer and the producer. They no longer have to advertise or run "sales". They can charge full price and provide no customer service, because they know we will always want the product that they sell.

Those are my toughts on the reidency fair....at our residency fair you can find family practice, medicine, peds, OB, and maybe one or two community surgery programs.....once again market economics dictate that these are the programs that need to advertise because their product is not as deisred......

I hate to say this... but the fact that ortho acts like they don't give a flying f might just be the personality of ortho and/or orthopods not based on competitiveness. I have friends applying in equally competitive specialties rads, derm, optho even uro and ent who were treated far, far, far better than us, ortho applicants. maybe something to expect in residency...

Food for thought.

I know the process is not good. We desperately want to improve the application/interview process. But, what is with all the hostility? It's competitive, not impossible to get a spot. Many programs have social events before interviews, we try to (through the coordinator schedule available online) minimize conflicts and most programs will try to accomodate applicants when possible.

Most programs can not afford to pay for hotels and travel costs for every interviewee. Academic institutions have a very disparate management approach when it comes to primary care svcs and surgical services. These low $$ generators get money directly from Deans and med schools to do these borderline illegal recruiting efforts.

Ortho programs by and large pay for it out of their own pockets. When you interview 30-50 or even more, the costs can be staggering. Just taking the faculty out of the OR and office to conduct interviews is a financial burden.

You need to understand we have all been in your shoes, you have never been in ours. Hopefully you will be someday. If you think all Orthopaedists are jerks and/or just want to screw the little guy-you met the wrong people. Across the specialties orthopaedists tend to be the most well-rounded and intelligent Dr.s out there. And while the current atmosphere (read:$$ and malpractice) has made many jaded or bitter MOST orthopaedists love what they do and have quite a bit of compassion for their patients AND their present and future colleagues.

Last point-This particular forum by blueorthocoordinator is obviously an effort to reach out to the applicant and figure out how to improve the system. Try to be a little more constructive.

orthoprogdir,
unless you have matched in the last 5-7 years, you don't know what it is like to be in their shoes. for most going into ortho now, the ulcer started their first year of med school being told that they need to ace everything just to have a shot (even if that is not true). also, remember that it is february and this site usually turns bitter at this point every year because everyone is tired of flying all over god's green earth, smiling incessently, laughing at jokes they don't think are funny, and maxing out their credit cards all in the hopes of getting a spot. misery loves company and this site is one to help others and also to just plain vent at times. all that being said, it is nice to finally see some programs are figuring out that this site exists and are trying to give some constructive advice.

Obviously some of my initial thoughts was colored by some extreme behaviors during interview process (like getting rejected then called for an interview but given 12 hrs to decide)...

You are very correct in saying orthopods are some of the most well rounded and intelligent docs out there and that is one of the reasons we are attracted to the field. I actually dont think ortho depts need to do much precisely because of this BUT they still need to show up at these types of events such as residency fairs otherwise who knows/cares.

My home ortho program (GREAT GROUP OF GUYS AND FACULTY) is notorious for this and being chronically unhelpful even for minor stuff like career counseling until they like you which doesnt make sense... they usually have a table with flyers and stuff but no one there thus you really dont get a real taste of ortho until your sub-I for those who didnt decide on ortho coming out of the womb. This is almost too late for many.

So just show up.

As for the interview process, common courtesy and professionalism really goes a long way. And definitely, mid-week interviews or at least give one midweek option.

I guess that I don't understand the hostility that I am reading from some people. We all knew how hard and financially straining this time of year would be. We have been planning for it for years. So why does everyone seem so suprised when we have to buy plane tickets and hotel rooms, take time of off rotations, and show up and put on our best face? The programs don't owe us anything. Medical school has been full of hoops that we have to jump through and this is just one more. We are the ones who are trying to convince the programs that we are worth their time and we should be happy when they take the time to talk with us. I don't care if you have 260's on the boards, are AOA, honored every course, are number one in your class, and have ground-breaking research, you are not entitled to anything. The path will be easier for you, but just realize that this is a tough time of life, no matter what specialty that you are applying to. Sure, our friends that are applying to internal medicine, peds, and FP may be getting more wined and dined, but that is because the programs are all competing for applicants and feel a sense of accomplishement if they are able to fill all their spots. Ortho (and ENT, neurosurg, plastics, urology, ophtho . . .) are in a different boat. The programs are in a position to sit back and choose the best fits for their programs. It is the nature of the beast, but in the end it means that you will be surrounded by harder working, more qualified, and better people when it comes to starting residency than if they had just gone by the numbers and courted the "top" candidates by giving them a free ride during interviews.

I guess what I am saying is that the directors who are taking the time and effort to ask our opinion and to improve the process deserve more respect and gratitude than what we have been giving them. It is not a perfect world, but they are at least trying to make it better. Thank you for that.

I will offer an interview experiences that I hope is constructive.

The number of applicants you are interviewing at one time is a huge component. For example, at one program it was set up for four twenty minute interviews, with morning and afternoon groups based on alphabetical order. I was in the last group of the day and there were about forty applicants total There were two interview days and they tried to accommodate for either day, BIG MISTAKE, not capping the # people per day. I knew that by the time my 3:30 interview start time rolled around the faculty and residents were going to be sick and tired of talking to us. So instead of four twenty minute interviews our group had four sub-five minute interviews...the res coordinator would phone the room after a few minutes signaling the interviewer to finish up and move on....the chairman even mentioned to us not to worry about going at the end of the day b/c they would still be excited to talk to us.....He had good intentions but the attitude I saw when my time came was "hurry up and finish"....there were 5-6 applicants in the last group and we all got the same treatment as our last names fall at the end of the alphabet. The morning groups all had full enthusiastic interviews?.please pay attention to the dynamics of the interview. All night long prior to the interview they preached how important it was to get to know the applicant b/c of the small size of the program I am upset b/c I liked what the program had to offer but I don?t think our group was looked at equally.

My personal favorite was . . They sent out invitations via email to about twice as many people as they had spots. I responded within a few hours and was told they were full and that I was at the top of the waiting list based in the time I called. I called and emailed several times to follow up and see if I would be granted an interview and all my attempts at correspondence was IGNORED.

I would like the third year med students to make a list of these types of programs, so they arenty suprised when this kind of behavior happens....

Thank you all for the responses you have given. It helps me to get an insight on how to improve the interview process for the candidates. I know that it is too late for this year but every year after our interview dates I speak to the candidates and get their feedback on their experience with us. I take in good and bad statements and then try to changed those for the next interview year. So far it has worked. I got our department to change their interview process to a more fair and balanced system that makes it possible for someone with low scores and not AOA to compete with someone with a 250+ score and AOA. Because of this new process, our number of applicants for each interview day went from 50 to 20. I believe this makes it more personable and less of "cattle hearding" as I have heard many times. Our interviews are done in the morning so that the candidates can leave after lunch and not be with us all day. This gave many of our candidates the opportunity to make other interviews for that weekend. When I do up the interview schedule, it is done by 1st come 1st serve and because of the new process, we do not need to send out more invites then we have. For next year's interviews I am working on getting our program to either offer an interview through the week or have 3 interview dates instead of 2. Also, I would like to see our program attend some of the Residency Job Fairs that take place in the surrounding states.

Any more feedback would be greatly appreciated.

While it would be nice to be given the full ride to interviews, I think most of us understand why that isn't possible. However, there is certainly a big difference between programs that put a little extra effort into making the process less painful and those that clearly don't show respect for the applicants. I'm not talking just about money. Some of this is reiteration of previous posts, but the following is what I found to be especially helpful when interviewing (and I think it did have impact on my impressions of the programs).
1. Clear communication - let us know in advance when we had to be there and when we were going to be able to leave so that we could make reasonable plane flights. (most important!)
2. Offered a mid-week interview to decompress the schedule.
3. Split the day in two if there are alot of interviews, let the afternoon people know they were in the afternoon and don't make us come at 6am to sit around for 7 hours until our interviews
4. Offered group rates at a nearby hotel, arranged for said hotel to shuttle us to/from airport, social, and interviews.
5. Cancelled clinics, OR, etc... so that residents could hang out with us while we were waiting.
6. Aggressivly kept interview schedule on time.
7. Gave us a packet with faculty and resident bios, rotation schedules, call schedules, city info, etc to help us review (now I am actually reading these while I am trying to decide my rank list).
8. Made sure there were enough seats in the "holding area" so that the residents and interviewees could be comfortable while waiting.
9. Scheduled interviews back-to-back in adacent offices to minimize long waits and chaos of trying to figure out where you were supposed to be.
10. Let us know when they sent out their first batch of interviews where we were in the process (interview, position on wait list, no interview, etc...) so that we weren't waiting around for an email. I thought the rejections I received at the end of january were funny - Yeah, I think I already figured out you don't want me!

Anyway, those were the things that I appreciated. I was actually impressed by most of the coordinators in terms of their straightforwardness and professionalism in directing the process - although obviously only the horror stories get told here!

gamma

nice post, gamma.

i would like to second a couple of things.
-- the bio sheet is awesome. none of my interviews let me know who i'd see prior to the day, so it was great to have a paragraph to know who you were speaking with and maybe a subject for an intelligent question or two.
-- schedule is key. if it's a long day-- fine, just let us know when we can schedule our flight or get on the road.
-- rejections--> please send them. if you don't want us, have the courtesy to say so. the finality is better than the agony of hope.

to those with issues about the process-- it's not perfect, but you're applying for a job. lots of other professions have to fly around dressing up and laughing at bad jokes to get their foot in the door. at least we get to do it all at once. (well, you guys. i'll be doing it all again next year.
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finally-- ortho really does have the best coordinators. when i found out i had to do a prelim, i had to contact gsurg and medicine programs to try to find a spot. with the exception of my fantastic home gsurg coordinator, they were all pretty much disinterested and unsympathetic. made me psyched to try for ortho again next year.

sorry for the long post. hope all are surviving the last 6wks till match.
cheers.
firegirl

I'm rather shocked to read about the interview experiences some of you have had. I generally get a good deal of compliments about the efficiency of our day, but I thought it was mostly applicants blowing smoke. But from the lists of things candidates seem to appreciate, I think we actually are doing quite well. Hopefully other coordinators will read these posts and get some ideas for themselves as well as to pass along to the decision makers (PD and chairman) about how to improve their process.

I would hope that the majority of the coordinators do a good job during interview time if not all of them. However, there is only so much the coordinator controls concerning the interview process. Maybe a global template can be adapted for all Ortho Coordinators to use in regards to invitation letter, rejection letter, faculty & resident bios, institution/local information, etc...For example, the Orthopaedic Program Information Form through the ACGME, all Ortho programs use the same form, the only difference is the information they put in it. With a system like this, candidates would know what to expect at each interview and coordinators could be on the same page.

Just a thought............

I have to agree with Orthoprogdir. At my hospital it is hard to get the MED ED department to pay attention to Ortho, the big concern is the Medicine programs. That is where they want the money spent. MED ED here told me that they would prefer to spend the $$ on the Medicine programs attending the Residency Fairs and schedule at fairs that are geared to Medicine. The attitude is appalling, and I am not afraid to let all of my residents know this. We try to take care of our own in this program. We are aggressive in trying to take care of the residents in applying to companies for funding for meetings, books, etc. I have been doing this for almost 5 years and the caliber of people that come through are amazing. You guys are amazing.
Here at this hospital we pay for the room at the hotel and lunch for all the applicants who interview here. The Program Director and past Program Director understand about the high cost of interviewing and we offer a staggered schedule (over 2 1/2 months)and only interview 1-2 per day ( 3 days per week). Yes by the end of the season, we are tired, but we still do our best as to putting our best foot forward with the applicants.
I attend Residency Coordinator meetings and hear about the horror stories of "knocking on doors" and "calling the rooms" but in this day and age it is hard to get a group of docs to agree on giving up alot of their time. For us, the docs are interviewing on their lunch hour, in between cases, etc. This makes it seem like they are not giving up so much of their time. Each applicant gets about 20 minutes with an attending.
Hoepfully when the Match is over, the attitude will be more upbeat. Good luck to all of you in this process. I have enjoyed meeting the great applicants who interviewed here!

I actually think that a standardized form that every program put out would be a bad thing. Every program starts to look the same with things the way they are, so standardizing the process to death would make it even worse. I actually had a great time interviewing and think the process, flawed though it is, is difficult to make any better. I tend to think that if a program has a shabby interview day, then that tells me exactly what I want to know about the program. So from the standpoint of getting the information to aid in decision-making, I think if the program doesn't do well with the interview day, then that may be a reflection of how their program runs.

That said, I think the feedback that the coordinators are looking for is with regard to how to improve the interview process for their program. So to that end, these are my thoughts.

1. Organization and information- Nothing was worse than wondering where to be, when to be there, and how to get there. The more information in the form of schedules, directions, and names and pictures the better. Programs that had the whole day scheduled down to the minute and stack with it looked like they had a plan. One program in particular, which I actually liked a lot, had 4 rooms and basically just told you to make sure you've gone to all of them before you were done. This led to lots of wandering, lots of lost faces, and lots of standing around.

2. Something different- Anything to break the monotony was welcomed. Case Western's football game was awesome. UT-Memphis's skills lab made a lot of people stress out, but I thought it was fun. The Akron programs letting you go to the OR and interview in scrubs was great. Anyway to give the program character and innovative is welcomed.

3. Worthwhile Handouts- Handouts about the university, medical center, department of surgery, et al were pretty useless in my mind. Those programs that gave handouts with pertinent contact information, description of curriculum, staff and resident pics/bios, et al. were great.

4. Residents around early and often- Places where there were lots of residents around, who were interactive and not busy were great sources of information.

5. Interviewers who are free of other responsibilities- I hated when an interviewer was on the schedule and then not there, or showed up in the middle. This happened often, where I was talking to 1-2 of a 4 person interview panel and the last couple trickled in late, or weren't there at all. I would suggest maknig up schedules that morning after everyone is present and accounted for. This may be difficult, but then the list would match the interview. If there wasn't an interviewer there that was supposed to be, even if it was not the director or other important people, it gives the impressino that the applicant is missing out.

6. Don't send email unless it has something definitive- Obviously if I was selected or rejected or wait-listed, it was nice to hear. However, a couple places emailed to tell you when the real thing was coming. Invariably, the programs that said, we'll email you by xxx date didn't email until after the date.

Ok, I've written a freakin' book here, so I'll stop. Hope this info helps. Anyone agree or disagree?

rwbrhp29

I just wanted to clarify that many of us like any e-mail communication, regardless of how definitive it is (contrary to rwbrhp29's statement)

1.) Please send e-mails ahead of time telling us when invites will go out, even if it is an estimate. Since the invite process at most places is first come, first serve, anticipating invites is the key to getting the day you want. Rather than spending hours wading through past posts of when invites go out in order to guess when programs would send invites this year, it would be so much easier and more accurate if every program just told the applicants each year.

2.) Along with the e-mail telling us when invites will go out, it would be as important, if not more important, to let applicants know when the interview dates will be (I'm assuming most places know this by October/November). I know there are several dozen programs, far from all, that set their dates early and then publicize them (I think this comes from the coordinator's organization) - thank you! Since many dates will inevitably conflict each year, in order to pick the best date from the options we get (if any), we need to know when the other programs interview dates are. While we can guess when interviews will happen this year based on posts from last year, it saves a ton of time and is more accurate if the programs just send out the info.

3.) Please send out e-mails about our status. If a round of invites has gone out, and we didn't get one, we'll usually hear about it on this site, but it's really nice to hear from you letting us know if we're still on a waitlist, if apps are still being reviewed, or if we're rejected. It can't take that long to let us know where we stand.

4.) Please tell us we're rejected when you know. I received several rejections way after interviews ended, and still haven't heard from just as many places. I still haven't even heard from a place I rotated, St. Mary's. Obviously I'm rejected since their interviews are over. It's one thing that I wasted one of my precious 3 away rotations on them, but to not even send me a rejection is simply rude. Since I know I was not a jerk and I didn't rub anyone wrong, I simply did not get an interview because I'm not what they are looking for, which is fine. However, I feel the least I deserve for my time, effort, and money is a rejection e-mail and I didn't even get that. (My first draft of this e-mail didn't have their name, but because they were so rude they deserve the bad publicity, plus future applicants should beware).

If the above 4 things occured, then any irritation that I developed during this interview process would have been avoided. I hope this facilitates future change.