 All right, I hear you loud and clear over the last year or so, I've gotten a bajillion messages asking me what I look for in a radiology residency. So today I'm going to tell you exactly what I look for in a radiology residency and what I think you should look for going into application season. Decide you want to do the best field of medicine that is radiology. Let's go. All right. So obviously there are a ton of things that go into deciding what radiology residency you want to go to. And nobody really tells you what to look for. You kind of just have to figure it out on your own. And obviously I can't tell you everything that you need to look for, but I can tell you what I look for and what I found helpful in my program. Because after all, you want to find the best place for you and not anybody else. And I have to admit I'm a little nostalgic because University of North Carolina where I did my radiology residency, they just released this cool video on their residency program. I'll put a link up here. My program is the best and you guys should check it out if you want to do the best program. Enough talking. Let's get into the first thing I look for in a radiology residency. Number one, you have to find a resident run program. And what I mean by that is that the residents do all the work and make all the decisions for the most part. So you want to go somewhere that isn't run by attendings. Why is this guy sawing the background here? Like, can we just stop the construction? Maybe you can get rid of this background guys. So what do I mean by a resident run program? I mean that the residents run the program. It's pretty intuitive, right? So at certain places, radiology is run by the attendings and at others, the residents have a lot of autonomy. At my program, we had a lot of autonomy, which means we were making adult decisions as radiologists very early on in our residency. For instance, our second year of radiology, we are taking call by ourselves with just a senior in-house and we are making final diagnoses on major things overnight. It's scary as a second year, but it also helps form you into an amazing radiologist. And obviously on bias, for my second year of radiology residency, when I started to have to make these big decisions on my own without any help, I felt myself grow as a radiologist. And I felt going into my third year, I was like a completely different person. And I've spoken with other radiology residents at other programs who don't make final decisions overnight and or they may have attendings in a house that read all the studies overnight. Again, this is my personal opinion. I feel like as a resident, you need to kind of feel that stress of making an incorrect decision. It kind of forces you to study and it forces you to be better. At the end of the day, if you miss something, it can hurt somebody. So the thing I look for is a program that had trauma. What I mean by trauma is a level one trauma center. I always wanted to go somewhere where they had a level one trauma center because you get to see some crazy accidents, of course the ambulance again, just kill me over here. I'll wait soon after. So I wanted to go somewhere with a level one trauma center because that is where all the severe trauma goes. There aren't many hospitals around the country, but usually they are associated with big academic institutions. And again, they have the crazy traumas, the most severe car accidents, gunshots, knife accidents, et cetera, et cetera. So you want to have that kind of experience in training because you want to be exposed to all of these types of imaging. And furthermore, if you decide you want to do interventional radiology, you want to have some trauma training as well. So for instance, my fellowship is not associated with a level one trauma center. So if I didn't have that trauma experience from residency, I wouldn't get it now. And that means I wouldn't really get it anywhere unless I went to some academic level on trauma center for an attending job. It's good to have exposure to that kind of thing in training. You may not need it going forward. But again, like anything in training, you'd rather be exposed to it than not have any exposure at all. Number three, volume. You have to have volume in your residency. You don't want to go somewhere where they read like two or three studies a day. You want to be beat down into the ground reading a ton of studies because that is how it is in the real world. Again, I want to reiterate over and over again, the goal of residency in your training is to prepare you for the real world. Why would you want to go somewhere that reads two or three CTs a day when you'll finish and you're reading 150 CTs a day? The only way you're going to read 150 CTs is if you read 150 CTs and residency. Volume is everything. You have to have a lot of volume in order to prepare you to be a good radiologist going forward. I cannot stress that enough. My program had a ton of volume. We would read upwards of 140, 150 studies in a 12 hour shift overnight. And when you have to read that fast, you learn how to make decisions and you learn how to make them quickly. We don't have time to just sit and stare at an image for an hour and a half to kind of ponder and make a diagnosis. And the only way to learn that is through volume, volume, volume. Fourth thing I look for in a radiology residency is a good mixture of all subspecialties. You want to go somewhere that has neuro radiology, muscle scale to radiology, breast imaging, interventional radiology, pediatric radiology, cardiovascular imaging, chest imaging, head and neck imaging. You want all of that. You don't want to go somewhere that just has a little bit of breast imaging and no MSK radiology or no neuro radiology. You want the all-encompassing training. Even if like for myself, I probably won't be using any of my neuro radiology training except for when I make YouTube videos like the Lennox Hill one up here. But most of the time, I won't ever use that stuff. Again, I can't stress enough. It's better to be over-trained than under-trained. I promise you going into boards, which are very tough by the way, you want to be trained in all of these different subspecialties within radiology because you'll feel more prepared going into your board exam. Go somewhere that has a little bit of everything. All right. The fifth thing I look for is go somewhere that has a small number of fellows. Fellowships across the board and all of the radiology subspecialties tend to do a lot of the imaging and take care of a lot of the procedures. So in order to be exposed to procedures and some of the advanced imaging and residency, you need to go somewhere that doesn't have that many fellows. It has the volume so that you can do some of this stuff in residency as well. So for instance, as a radiology resident, I did a lot of procedures because we didn't have a lot of fellows throughout our residency or throughout our radiology program. This is especially important if you go into interventional radiology because you don't want someone like myself who is taking all of these procedures and not leaving any for the residents. Now obviously, there's always enough to go around, but if you want to get involved in some of the high level procedures, the fellows tend to have priority over you when it comes to these. So you want to go somewhere that doesn't have the fellows taking all of your opportunities away from you. My program was the perfect balance, which is why I wanted to go there. Number six. Now this may not be that important to others, but for myself, it was pretty important and that is location. It's the same thing in real estate, location, location, location, that is paramount in your residency because after all, you don't want to spend four years of your life in a city that you don't really like. For instance, if I didn't enjoy hiking or snow, I would not want to go to Colorado for residency, which is why I didn't go to Colorado for residency. I tend to prefer a more city life, which is why I did my internship in New York and now doing fellowship in New York as well. But I sacrificed a little on my location because I love my program so much. So for some people it's very important and others it's not. In terms of location, I wanted to be close to a big city that had an international airport and I love going in and out of my airport in North Carolina because it was 10 minutes away and I could get anywhere in the world with a quick little transfer. It was so perfect. And also if you have children, you want to go somewhere that has reputable schools and all that stuff. So location is pretty important to some and not so important to others. Number seven, you want to go somewhere that has attendings who are willing to teach. Now this information is very difficult to piece together while doing all of your research for different types of residencies. But the best way you should kind of come about this information is to ask residents on your interview or ask residents who you know have been in a certain program. There's a lot of programs out there full of attendings who don't really teach. Some programs have a lot of lecture time that is taught by your peers or current residents. My program had a ton of different faculty members that were 100% devoted to teaching and that's half of it. Honestly, you want to go somewhere who has side by side readout because that's where you learn the most. But my program had a lot of volume and this wouldn't have been possible. And honestly, I don't think I would have liked side by side reading after reading like 20 CTS at 5pm. I just want to get the heck out of there and not check the notes later. So the next thing I look for, which is similar to location, is going somewhere with a cheap cost of living or an inexpensive cost of living. You don't really make that much money in residency. So you don't want to go somewhere that only has apartments available for $4,000 a month because you can't really afford that. Now there are a lot of programs who offer subsidized housing, especially in New York City. There also are others that don't and some places are just expensive to live. Even in North Carolina where I did my training, it wasn't that inexpensive to live and we also had a lower salary than most. But it was definitely doable, especially when you're married. If I were single living there, it wouldn't be as easy. So this is just something to consider as well. The next thing I look for in residency is somewhere that offers good moonlighting opportunities. Again, at my program, we had a ton of different opportunities to moonlight, including babysitting MRIs, which means you basically just sit in a room and are present in case someone develops a contrast reaction. Others included reading as an upper level resident, actually reading and sending out images. You are more capable as a senior resident and all these opportunities got you paid really well. Radiology residency isn't too demanding, which means we have a lot of time outside of the hospital in order to do this moonlighting stuff. So if you find a program that has good moonlighting opportunities, it makes the low salary you get in residency hurt a little less. All right. The final thing to look for in radiology residency is the gut feeling. Now I was a naysayer when it came to this. Everybody I talked to about residency programs that would always tell me just go with your gut, go with your gut, go with your gut. And I was like, what are you talking about? I would go to so many interviews. I went on like 10 plus interviews and I was like, what do you mean this gut feeling? And then one of my last interviews was at the University of North Carolina and I had that gut feeling. Finally, like when I left the place, I was like, this is the place I'm going to go and I don't care who is going to get in my way. I'm going to go to this program because that's how much I liked it and that's how much I fit in. So believe me when I tell you the gut feeling thing is real. Trust your inner gut. It'll take you exactly where you need to go. All right. So I know that was an exhausting list. There's like 10 plus things to look for when looking for a radiology residency. I hope some of these are useful to you all as you go through the current application cycle or anybody who goes on it in the future. Let me know in the comments below if you have any other questions. As always, make sure you smash that like subscribe button, follow me on YouTube. I'll see you all on the next video.