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Useful Tidbits for Students
Predoctoral Fellowship Funding Sources
Residency Programs with Research Tracks 
Points on Selecting an Advisor and a Laboratory
(Courtesy of Dr. John Tew)
- This is a very important decision. You will either like your advisor or hate him or her. The relationship is too close for ambivalence.
- The graduate phase is very different from your undergraduate or medical studies. Month after month is spent in the same lab with the same people.
- There are reasons why some labs work and some labs do not work. Some students discover they have a problem after three or four years and that is a bit too late.
- Funding is an important issue. It is difficult to do good work without money. How many grants does the faculty member have? How many people depend on these grants for funding?
- Productivity is another issue. How many publications do they have per year? It takes about three to finish a thesis.
- Availability of the advisor is yet another issue. Administrative responsibility and heavy teaching loads can be a problem.
- You should worry more about learning how to do science and solve research problems than about the particular topic of study. You can always specialize later.
- How should you go about choosing? Look up past students and ask questions. If they have had problems, you should look out. Ask the current students; they will probably have useful information. By all means look at the publications. A weak publication record can mean future problems.
Advice on Transitioning Back Into M-3
(Courtesy of Evan Kransdorf)
Before the transition
- Three to four months before your intended transition date, contact and meet with the head of the Curriculum Office to select a rotation schedule.
- Remind the curriculum office to make sure you are listed in the appropriate databases so that your VCU card can open the hospital doors and work the scrub machine and you will be able to get a Cerner login and password. (Cerner is the MCV clinical computer system.)
- The Curriculum Office will give you the name of the president of the current M-3 class. This person is an important contact because he or she will arrange for you to get a pager and arrange for your name to be added to the M-3 email list.
- Two to Three months before your intended transition date, contact the leader of your M-3 rotation group. This person is in charge of selecting the schedule for each rotation so it is important to make him or her aware that you will be joining their group. If you will be in multiple groups it is probably prudent to contact all of the group leaders involved to just give them a heads up.
- As your intended transition date gets closer, make sure to contact Financial Aid to make sure you are in the computer as being a medical student and not a graduate student.
Back to M-3
- Clerkships are just like everything else you do in school. You will need to study and do what you are told to do.
- You will feel a little behind the "normal" medical students for a bit, especially if you start mid-year (not so if you start in August with a fresh class), but you will catch up to the other students quickly.
- Do not be afraid to ask the other students for help since usually people are fairly helpful.
- When you are doing the clerkship in the area in which you intend to apply for residency, make sure to do a great job and make friends with attendings during the rotation. As an M.D./Ph.D. student you do not have much time to make a good impression and you will need to ask them for letters of recommendation. (Do so shortly after the clerkship is over.)
- Ask for letters of recommendation early. It usually takes attendings a while to get them written.
Advice on shelf exams
- Every clerkship except Family Medicine ends with a shelf exam, written by the National Board of Medical Examiners.
- The shelf exams are generally quite challenging, but this is a good thing because by the end of the year you will be well prepared for the Step II of the USMLE.
- Questions tend not to be limited to the subject area being tested. (The surgery exam contains some medicine questions and the medicine exam contains some surgery questions and the psychatritry exam contains some neurology and peds questions.)
- There are 100 questions, for which you usually get 2 hours and 10 minutes and sometimes a bit more.
- Questions mostly involve clinical scenarios. ("You are working in the ER and a 24-year-old woman presents with chest pain, altered LOC and tachycardia. What is the best diagnostic test to determine the origin of her chest pain?")
- Knowing the symptoms and signs, diagnostic methods and treatment for each condition is essential.
- Work through the exam questions as quickly as possible and do not spend a lot of time thinking about the question if you do not know the answer. Make your best guess and move on. (Medical students in the past have run out of time and not finished the exam.)
- They test clinical knowledge and not basic science knowledge. No matter how many times an attending during surgery pimps you on the layers of the abdominal wall, this will not be on the exam.
- I recommend the NMS series of review books with the caveat that they have too much information and you need to dissect out the important info. For each disease know the definition, risk factors, etiology, symptoms and signs, diagnostic methods, treatment, and complications.
- Doing a book of questions can also be helpful.
Framework for M-3 and beyond
- You do seven clerkships during M-3 (medicine – 12 weeks, psychiatry – 6 weeks, surgery – 8 weeks, neurology – 4 weeks, family medicine – 4 weeks, pediatrics – 8 weeks, obstetrics & gynecology – 6 weeks).
- It is good advice to do an elective clerkship (usually 4 or 6 weeks) in whatever area you think you want to go into, especially if this is an area you will not or cannot encounter during the normal M-3 clerkships such as radiology, cardiology, and infectious disease.
- "Normal" M-3 students cannot do electives until their fourth year, but M.D./Ph.D. students can usually arrange to do away electives at a university hospital other than MCV after a few clerkships have been completed. This is a good idea to see if you like working in the area of interest to you and to make connections at a specific institution where you are interested in doing your residency.
- You will take two USMLE-Step II exams: the Clinical Knowledge (USMLE-II-CK) and Clinical Skills (USMLE-II-CS) exams. The administration will scare you with emails that say these exams need to be taken prior to applying to residency programs. However, for M.D./Ph.D. students, you can go ahead and apply to residency programs and take the USMLE-Step II exams after your clerkships are complete, though you must pass these exams before beginning internship.
- For most specialties, except for some surgical specialties such as neurosurgery, residency applications are filed through the Electronic Residency and Application Service (ERAS). The first day that applications can be filed is September 1 of the year prior to year you enroll in the program.
- Interviews are offered during the months of November, December, and January to applicants once applications have been reviewed.
- In February you will enter your "rank order list" on the National Residency Match Program (NRMP) website, this is the final list of your choice of the programs to which you have applied.
- You will match in March.
- You will graduate in May.
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