robclem21

I don't necessarily agree with this. Obviously it is specialty dependent, but why would using a PD letter from a school be wasted when applying to that school. The PD will not review every application and every letter. There are residents and faculty who do that. Seeing a strong letter from the PD of their program will nearly guarantee you an interview there. It's a name they recognize and trust to evaluate candidates. If someone did an elective with my program and did not have a reference letter from that rotation I would be wondering what went wrong.... As a PD if I wrote someone a letter an

Sending a short, respectful email asking if there is an opportunity to meet couldn't hurt. If they have an admin assistant I would email them first rather than directly emailing the PD to see if they are able to set something up.

I'm not a family doctor, but this question doesn't seem overly complex or cryptic to me. If you are applying for this specialty, I would hope you have your own opinion and thoughts on this question without relying on others to provide you the answer. Especially since this even seems like a reasonable interview question for any family medicine program where you don't have the option of phoning a friend.

This wouldn't show up your MSPR since MSPR is meant to be a summary of evaluations from your rotation and a commentary on your professionalism and clinical abilities. Also not entirely sure this would show up on a medical school transcript since all med school courses are pass/fail. If you are referring to undergrad deans honour list, nobody would care for CaRMS.

^^ This. Abstract shouldn't really belong under publications. To me that is more misleading than putting it under presentations despite the fact you did not present it. It was accepted as a presentation, not as a publication, so put it under presentations and put an asterisk to denote presenting author. I also usually bold my own name to make it easily distinguishable. e.g. Presentations (* denotes presenting author): Author A., Author B., Author C.*, Author D. Title. [oral presentation/poster] Date. Conference. Location.

Most medical schools also have a service available through their guidance counselling centre that will provide CaRMS review for free to medical students. It isn't perfect, but does give you an extra set of unbiased eyes (i.e. you don't want friends/family who just tell you everything is perfect and edit a few commas here and there). I don't think its ever necessary to pay anyone to review these. The feedback is not any more valuable than you'd receive otherwise.

I think you are missing the point here a little bit from what everyone is trying to communicate to you. Allow me to try once more to summarize for you: 1. At some point, everyone in medical school is or feels average. Which, to be fair, is likely true because everyone who gets in to medical school is so far above average that compared to each other, it's tough to stand out and feel like a rockstar. You are also learning a vast amount of information thats completely unfamiliar so it will take time to adjust and become comfortable with your clerkship responsibilities. This is OKAY. 2.

Agree with above, that co-authorship on manuscripts is not viewed negatively, but definitely not viewed as favourably as being the 1st or senior author on a publication. The reason 1st author is viewed in much stronger light than co-authorship is because the primary author generally has a larger role in the project and has taken responsibility for most of the main milestones including project conception, design, conduct, analysis, manuscript writing, etc. It isn't uncommon in large research groups for many co-authors to pop-up on a manuscript without having contributed much or anything to

You should become involved in something, but more for your own sanity than for residency applications. Studying non-stop as your only form of "doing stuff" isn't particularly good for your own mental health and self-care.

First off, one month in you should not be stressing about CaRMS. As much as it seems like all your colleagues have everything figured out, I can promise you that they don't. Not everybody has these "connections", and there is nothing stopping from all these people from changing their minds about what specialty they want. In fact, most will. it is not common for people to end up in the specialty they wanted when they first started medical school. You have a lot of time to figure out residency matching down the road. Second, I agree with the above poster. Your role now is to explore differe

As others have said, I'm not going to get into a long argument with you here, but in short, you are taking a very over-simplified approach to a very complex problem and a very complex field in immuno-histochemistry (such as ignoring the biomolecular details of how these antigens are processed and presented to the immune system, the many different subtypes of MHC and their location and role in developing immune response, and the complex mechanisms of T-cell response *hint, it isn't a single schematic like your first year biology textbook would have you believe* ). Often this approach lead

To be honest, most bachelors degrees aren't worth the paper they are printed on. Undergraduate biology courses provide such a rudimentary understanding (like the one you tried to explain above and those of cartoon drawings meant to explain things to the public) of the field that you really don't know enough to do draw your own conclusions or suggest those with PhDs, MDs, multiple fellowships, and other advanced degrees who know much more than you do are wrong. So yes, what you are writing here is incredibly ignorant. I don't pretend to understand every bit of science that goes into the vaccine

Not a surgical resident, but as a clerk it would be more beneficial to know more complete management of surgical cases, rather than specific details about the operation. From time to time, you may get pimped on some anatomy in the OR, but what would impress residents and staff more would be how to take an effective history and physical, a good differential for the surgical presentations (for e.g. knowing the difference between cholelithiasis, choledocholithiasis, acute cholecysitis, or cholangitis) and how to work-up and manage these patients. That would be more high yield than the step by ste

Don't worry. Once you start you will be inundated with information and opportunities for all of the above. Everyone is in the same boat.

I've noticed a very disturbing trend on this forum of medical students (or even pre-meds for that matter) who post a question, and then proceed to disregard/argue with all of the advice given by those with more experience (residents, staff, etc.). It seems like the true purpose of most of these threads is to seek reassurance of their pre-conceived opinions rather than actually have an open mind to the views of others and gain insight into their questions. Then, when they don't get it, it turns into an unrelated argument about billing and how much money each specialty can make. Just how OP