Sub-I (surgery vs medicine vs whatever else) recommendations: Definitely do an IR sub-I at your home institution if available. See if your school allows it to count for your sub-I requirement. I was lucky and didn't have to do a surgery or medicine sub-I, although I may be underprepared for intern year. I got mixed feedback as to whether I should do away rotations in IR. A few people felt that IR rotators tend to "disappear" towards the end of the rotation due to the workload. There's also the chance that you say something weird during your rotation. I ended up doing
two aways. I enjoyed both rotations, but I would've done just one in retrospect.
# of away rotations if any: 2; 1 month UC Irvine; 2-weeks Stanford
LORs needed: 4 Total: 2 IRs; 1 radiologist; 1 surgeon. I've heard this is the best combination. Even better if the surgeon is a vascular surgeon.
# and type (surgery, medicine, TY) of prelim programs to apply to: I'm doing prelim surgery. You can apply to 10 surgery prelims programs and have a good chance of matching. Prelim-surgery internships are phone-interviews and are notorious for being the least desirable programs in the entire match. A lot of places were excited about filling their prelim surgery spots with IR applicants.
# of prelim programs to interview at to: Applied to 20, heard crickets from 7, received 8 interview invites and 5 rejections.
# of programs to apply to (both IR/DR and DR-only): I originally applied to 65 programs (see * for commentary). This included 30 IR, 15 DR, and the 20 prelims. You absolutely
do not need that many prelim surgeries.
# of programs to interview at: I received 20 interview invites, interviewed at 14 programs, and ranked 8. My rank list had 16 entries since I ranked IR and DR separately. I was going off of the
2016 Charting Outcomes which states you have a 90% chance of matching by ranking four DR programs. If I don't match I'll feel terrible, but I don't think there's a huge probability of that happening.
Anything else: I've heard the best prelim surgery programs are at non-academic, private institutions like
Virginia Mason,
Swedish,
Huntington Hospital, and
Morristown. These tend to have less floor work and more OR time. Another option is UW's program, as they have a webpage discussing
prelim-surgery for IR. Albeit, UW has one of the busiest programs.
*Pet peeve of the application process:
Eight programs were either misclassified on ERAS (Beth Israel IR, Cornell IR, Temple IR, UCSF IR, UCSD) or canceled their program (Univ. Texas IR, Loma Linda IR, MGH prelim merged to categorical IR). That's ~$150 down the drain as we had to reapply to the misclassified ones. It's weird that ERAS didn't offer any sort of refund when it was the institutions' mistake.
