 So you want to get into residency but what's a few things that you can do besides getting a high step one score or going to a prestigious school to help increase your chances of doing that. Exactly what we'll talk about. Let's get into it. Hey everyone, welcome to the channel. My name is Lakshman, internal medicine resident and this channel and the podcast is completely designed to help people succeed on their medical journey but do it with less stress. So if you're new here, consider subscribing to the YouTube channel as well as the podcast and hitting the like button if you're watching this on YouTube to go ahead and show me that one you enjoy this kind of content but also support us in the fancy YouTube outfit. Today I want to talk about how to increase your chances of getting into a good residency and I want to give you a little bit of a backstory that way you can decide if you want to listen to my tips or not. I went into internal medicine and when I was applying I was told that maybe per my step score, my step two score and my GPA I needed to apply to about three programs to have a hundred percent chance of matching. I ultimately applied to a little under 23 and I went on 10 interviews, got 14 and only went on 10 of them and ultimately got into my number one choice. So those are basically my numbers but more importantly I want to illustrate that my stress during this entire process was much lower than you know my typical peer and that's not because I was confident that I would get into my number one. There's still some stress involved but I think I was involving a lot of these tips that I'm about to give you that increase my chances of getting into the programs that I truly desire. Now a few things we should talk about before the tips is to really understand what residency programs value. Now I'm going to go ahead and put a chart over the screen but a lot of them really revolve around grades so your step two score, your grades in your clerkship, your grades, your desired specialty as well as your step one score. Clearly the grades and the valuations are important but I want to make sure that this video in this episode is valuable regardless of not if you've taken step one step two and gotten the grade that you wanted for your desired specialty. The second thing I want to make clear is it's really important to understand what a good residency program means to you. Now would you really want to go somewhere that has high prestige value but may not be the perfect fit for you and maybe three plus years of misery and most of us would probably ideally say no so it's important to map out your most important factors and I did this when I was applying to residency is I listed kind of in four columns different things that I value so things like geographic constraints I really want to be close to my family for both my sake as well as my wife's sake training quality I wanted to make sure that when I finished my three years of internal medicine residency that I was a very competent physician that had seen a little bit of everything and also whether or not it aligned with my future goals and so you know all of us will have different things and you may not know exactly what you want to do but you want to say is this program focused on the things that I may be considering in the future so if you want to work in a clinic for example with HIV patients but the facilities that you're going to be working at this potential residency program don't really have the infrastructure allowed for you to get that experience in that training maybe it's not the best place to go given your future goals and finally other things that you can consider things like salaries as well as kind of call schedules and those are things that come a little bit when you're applying to residency but they're still important things to consider because if you're somebody who is with a family you don't want to move to somewhere that is a high cost of living but your salary may not be able to support both you as well as your family but once you understand your ideal residency what it kind of looks like what type of things you hope it offers you then let's get into different tips that you can use to increase your chances so the first thing to help you increase your chances of getting into a good residency after you've kind of done the good research is you want to constantly work on something that I love calling your angle for your specific specialty compared to when we're applying to medical school when you're applying to residency it's even harder for you to stand out from the rest of your peers if you're going into a field like radiology there's only so many experiences and reasons that people want to go into this field so almost everyone kind of looks the same on paper that's definitely nerve-wracking and you can increase your anxiety when you're going through the application process so to make it a little bit less stressful you want to ask yourself what's my angle and the simple way to do this is ask yourself what experiences have you had and what qualities about yourself as well as your future goals would make you look different for the specific residency specialty so for example if you're going to orthopedic surgery you may reflect back on your experiences and realize that you yourself were a college athlete or a high school athlete and you had a lot of different injuries and you were really interested in the musculoskeletal system and you know your future goals aren't working with specific athletes in the community or on a more local or national level this is a perfect example of how you can use your past experiences to create an angle towards your desired specialty because then you can do the next few tips that we'll talk about of using this angle and constantly shower it all throughout your letters of recommendation your personal statement and your application as well as your interviews now finding your angle is by no means an easy activity it's going to take several reiterations to go through but a simple way to kind of understand where your angle may be it's just map out different experiences you've had that you think are unique than your fellow peers either different experiences different viewpoints of what your intrigue may be and while everything individually may seem a little superficial may seem like somebody else has it once you combine it you end up with an application that only looks like you and so you want to use your best ability to make sure you highlight the different varieties in your experiences and your desires that will best complement that specialty now once you have your angle the next step is to make sure that you find what the program values the programs that you really want to go to that you consider to be a good program and you want to make sure that you tailor your letters of recommendation and your personal statement specifically for them it's important to remember that you don't have to send the same draft or generic personal statement to all of the programs that you're applying to if there's a few programs that you would love to get into just ask yourself what makes each of them unique and how can you align your angle from step number one with their specific or unique kind of propositions that they're offering for you and then you would try to include that into your personal statement and you would upload that specific draft that would go to that institution you would ask your letter writers to potentially talk about one of your experiences that match well with what the residency program may try to offer you as their unique selling point as an example and this is just off the top of my head let's go back to the applicant who's applying to orthopedic surgery we've already established that they want to work with athletes in the future and they have an athletic background and maybe they've had some experiences in medical school kind of working with athletes themselves and then they find a residency program that may have a specific clinic for young athletes or an ability to be on the sidelines of a football game or a basketball game for them to be able to practice their skills that may seem like a perfect fit for them and something that they would consider to be a good residency program so they would make sure that their personal statement has those different pieces of saying hey you have this at your program and these are some experiences that I've had I would love to continue moving this forward to my ultimate goal of doing you know working with athletes um as an orthopedic surgeon and similarly you would tell your letter writers hey they have this awesome clinic or this experience at this program I would really want them to know that I would be intrigued in doing so do you mind writing a specific draft just for them and obviously you don't need to do this for every single program you apply to but do this for the ones that you think that maybe your chances of getting into could be improved if you made your application more specific to them. Step number three is something you can do in medical school and that's constantly looking for experiences and opportunities to add to your angle so this can include things like research shadowing going to different conferences whether that be at your institution or something you could travel to is working on different projects that you can just say you did that may be working on a poster presentation and abstract you want to just kind of create a resume and not things that stuff it but things that are meant to show hey these are my ultimate goals and here are a few things that I've done that co-inline with that once you understand what your angle is for desired specialty you stop saying yes to all different experiences you may be offered but instead find would it be tailored for something that I want to accomplish in the future you know if I want to become a cardiologist would working at a health fair where you're teaching patients about their cardiovascular risks and their health would that align with my future goals absolutely but if it was something else like you know working at a free clinic for a different specialty I wouldn't be interested in maybe my time could be used elsewhere but it doesn't matter if you're a first year medical student or if you're just about to graduate and apply for residency you can still find experiences even if they may not go on your resume of things you can talk about on your interviews and your personal statements if time allows so if you think that your application is done it never really is you always want to be finding experiences not only to get into residency but increase your chances of getting into fellowship as well as just defining whether your current goal for your future you know in medicine is actually what you want to do you know if you only work at a few clinics working with athletes and then you do a whole residency where you're working through that unique experience then you realize you hate it well you could have easily avoided that by doing more experiences as a medical student so find as many opportunities as you can to go ahead and be as diverse and variety packed as possible and use that to sell your angle during your interviews during your personal statements and on your letters of recommendation those guys are my various tips to help you get into a good residency program if you guys enjoyed make sure you hit that like button it tells me one that you enjoyed this piece of content you want more on tips for residency as well it just kind of helps the channel out and supports it and consider subscribing if you haven't done so already finally if you are looking for more tips for medical school as well as residency i'll link down a few resources if you're just about to start residency relatively soon then we do have something called the intern survival guide which is a nice kind of training program to make you not only somebody who is a good intern but a fabulous intern so that'll be linked down below in case you guys are interested i'll link down a below a few other videos that we have on residency and applying for residency as well thank you guys so much for making it to the end of the video i really appreciate your support hopefully i've been a little help to you on your journey thanks for being a part of mine see you guys in the next one peace