Residency Interviews

So I've been on a few residency interviews in the past couple weeks, and let me just say....residency interviews RULE!!! Med school interviews are terrible - at best, the questions you get are variations on the general theme of "why in the world should we let you come here?" On residency interviews (4 now), I have only been asked one relatively serious question, and none at all pertaining to medical knowledge. The gist of residency interviews is, "What can we say/do to make you sign a contract here?" So here is what makes residency interviews so great: First, they pay for you to stay at nice hotels. And not just for the interview itself. If you want to come back for a "second look" (which is where you schedule a second trip out to look at a program after they've already interviewed you) they will pay for that stay too.

So when you get to the hotel, some nice residents from the program meet you in the lobby and take you out to a fancy restaurant and tell you all about why you should come to that program. You kind of have to take their information with approximately the same grain that you would a drug rep dinner, but it's still great!

The next day you go on your interviews, and a tour of the hospital, and then some other residents take you out to a nice lunch too! It's fun getting to meet all these new people, and see the different programs, but I have to say, after only 4 interviews, all the hospitals and residents are starting to run together, and if I hear "So do you have any more questions?" one more time I'm going to have a stroke. Some people I know are going on like 15 interviews, and I don't know how they're going to survive. Seriously.