How to be competitive for peds cardio

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stevo2365

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So I am beginning my peds residency at a great program with a fairly decently recognized peds cardio program. With that being said, from what I'm sure you gathered, I really want to pursue pediatric cardiology and I was wondering if anyone has any advice specifically to this field that can help me be more competitive. I want to hit the ground running when it comes to building up my resume, so any advice would be awesome. Thanks!

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So I am beginning my peds residency at a great program with a fairly decently recognized peds cardio program. With that being said, from what I'm sure you gathered, I really want to pursue pediatric cardiology and I was wondering if anyone has any advice specifically to this field that can help me be more competitive. I want to hit the ground running when it comes to building up my resume, so any advice would be awesome. Thanks!

Just being from a strong residency program, and thus also already having a good baseline application, you'll have your foot in the door and likely get an interview at most programs. Top programs are looking to train academic cardiologists. Start a cardiology research project now, or two, or three. Keep in mind this will be challenging to accomplish during your busy resident schedule. Make sure the project is DOABLE and that you have an excellent mentor. Carefully choosing the right mentor will make a huge difference in the ultimate success of the research. Do a cardiology elective early. Get to know the faculty. Design a cardiology-oriented selective. Start thinking about what kind of cardiologist you want to be (imaging, electrophysiology, interventional, heart failure/cardiomyopathy, CICU, etc). On your interview day expect to be able to present a 5-10 year career plan and a general plan for your research during fellowship. If you can legitimately pull of the latter, this will make you look like a rock star. Again, the top fellowships want to train academic cardiologists and they want to choose fellows that have a high pre-test probability of succeeding. Convince them on your potential for success.
 
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Just being from a strong residency program, and thus also already having a good baseline application, you'll have your foot in the door and likely get an interview at most programs. Top programs are looking to train academic cardiologists. Start a cardiology research project now, or two, or three. Keep in mind this will be challenging to accomplish during your busy resident schedule. Make sure the project is DOABLE and that you have an excellent mentor. Carefully choosing the right mentor will make a huge difference in the ultimate success of the research. Do a cardiology elective early. Get to know the faculty. Design a cardiology-oriented selective. Start thinking about what kind of cardiologist you want to be (imaging, electrophysiology, interventional, heart failure/cardiomyopathy, CICU, etc). On your interview day expect to be able to present a 5-10 year career plan and a general plan for your research during fellowship. If you can legitimately pull of the latter, this will make you look like a rock star. Again, the top fellowships want to train academic cardiologists and they want to choose fellows that have a high pre-test probability of succeeding. Convince them on your potential for success.

Awesome! This is exactly what I wanted to know. Thanks so much!
 
Just being from a strong residency program, and thus also already having a good baseline application, you'll have your foot in the door and likely get an interview at most programs. Top programs are looking to train academic cardiologists. Start a cardiology research project now, or two, or three. Keep in mind this will be challenging to accomplish during your busy resident schedule. Make sure the project is DOABLE and that you have an excellent mentor. Carefully choosing the right mentor will make a huge difference in the ultimate success of the research. Do a cardiology elective early. Get to know the faculty. Design a cardiology-oriented selective. Start thinking about what kind of cardiologist you want to be (imaging, electrophysiology, interventional, heart failure/cardiomyopathy, CICU, etc). On your interview day expect to be able to present a 5-10 year career plan and a general plan for your research during fellowship. If you can legitimately pull of the latter, this will make you look like a rock star. Again, the top fellowships want to train academic cardiologists and they want to choose fellows that have a high pre-test probability of succeeding. Convince them on your potential for success.
The one thing to add to this is that you need to get it in gear quickly too. Cardiology (and onc) still do the second year match, meaning you only have about a year to accomplish all of this stuff. No small feat. Good news is that it sounds like you've already started making a plan, so just go hard and accept that intern year is going to be really busy. The payoff is that you'll be matched by the end of your second year which is a pretty great feeling.
 
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Sorry to hijack this, but I have a very similar inquiry, just from a different vantage point in terms of where I'm at in my training. I'm an MS3 thinking about pediatric cardiology as well, so I know I have a few years -- but since it's hard to get research done during intern year, I'm wondering if I should work hard to be productive while in med school to compensate for some of the anticipated difficulty accomplishing research during residency. I don't know how feasible it is to do research during third year rotations, but would you recommend doing a lot of peds cards research during MS4 in anticipation of fellowship applications? I don't think it's necessary to take a year off of med school to do research to be competitive, right? My issue is that I live in LA and would like to stay here for residency and fellowship if possible, but the only fellowship programs are UCLA and CHLA which I'm assuming are very highly sought after. I want to maximize my chances of matching peds cards in the future, but I don't want to go way overboard in the meantime while doing so. Another issue is that, while I love learning about congenital heart disease and I've thoroughly enjoyed all of my clinical exposure to pediatric cardiology, I don't know for sure that I want to subspecialize -- but I think by the time I would know for sure (during residency, probably), it'd be too late to do much to be a competitive applicant.

I did one project in congenital cardiology the summer after MS1 that is hopefully being accepted for publication any day now, but haven't done anything since. Step 1 score is definitely above average for peds, but I haven't taken Step 2 nor do I have grades from any of my rotations yet. Any advice would be awesome -- it seems early to be thinking about this, but also not, since fellowship applications would be ~3 years away for me which really isn't that much time (the first two years of med school certainly went by fast, anyway!). Thanks, and sorry for piggybacking on this topic :)
 
You don't HAVE to apply during your second year. Plenty of people don't figure out what they want to do until it's too late to put together a strong application. You just apply during your third year instead (and if you decide to do something other than cards--or heme/onc--that's also a third year match, giving you more time to figure things out), and find something to do during your gap year.

That said, seeking research is never a bad thing, unless it takes away from your ability to be a good clinician and get good evaluations.
 
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I just ran into one of our cards fellows and the word on the street is that next year's match will be moved to third year... interesting development....
 
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