Awesome. All right. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to our second Road to Residency Seminar. This is part two of four in total, where we're going to go over important, timely topics about this whole journey towards matching in residency. I am Dr. Ravi Kasi. I just want to make sure that all of our speakers got to introduce themselves, and then we're going to get right into it. So I will hand it to Ashley, if you want to introduce yourself, and then we can just pass the baton. Yeah. Hi, guys. I'm Ashley Bolger. I am at the University of Cincinnati, slash Cincinnati Children's Hospital. I serve on a bunch of different roles at my institution, including the program director for the combined P-3 HUB residency program, as well as the medical student clerkship director for all of our rotations. I also have the honor of serving with Nicola on the AAP's residency task force, and so we've been really involved with signaling, and are going to try to enlighten you with them today. I'm going to pass it to Nicola. Hi, everyone. I'm Nicola Dragojlovich. I'm the residency program director at UTHealth in Houston. Bonus points to anybody who can pronounce my name correctly by the end of this presentation. I'm excited to see you all and see lots of familiar faces from Twitter, so I look forward to hearing from each of you. Let's see. Who's next? I pick Raza. Hi, everybody. I see some familiar names listed on this participant, but my name is Raza. I'm a PGY2, relatively new to that role, but PM&R at Kessler and JMS. I also have the honor of sitting on the RFC this year. I'm the technology rep, so any digital media you see put up by the RFC, podcasts, presentations, anything like that, that goes through my team. I'm very excited to be here and to speak with you all. I can go next. I am Lauren. I'm a PGY1 at the University of Minnesota, previously was on the MSC, so I did this talk last year actually, so it's exciting to be on the other side. Hi, everyone. I'm Mark Volker. I'm a PGY4 at the University of Minnesota applying sports. I also sit on the RFC council with Raza. I'm the medical student affairs rep, so I help out with the medical student council and anything medical student related that comes through our door. I can go next. I'm Maya Peretil. I do private practice in general rehab in New Jersey, and I also serve as the pathway director for physical medicine and rehab at Drexel University College of Medicine, so actually I get to see as being pathway director interact with all the other pathway directors as well, so not only just physical medicine and rehab, but get to hear a lot about the application process, the signaling, the geographic locations, and what other residencies along with PM&R also have to talk about it. I do spinal cord injury medicine and brain injury medicine as well. Great. Hopefully, that is everybody. Forgive me if we missed anybody, but let's just get started with Dr. Bolger and Nicola giving a presentation. Just remember the chat is open, so feel free to write in questions there, and we will do our best to answer those questions in real time, and then of course we'll discuss them, so I'm going to stop talking. You guys have it. Okay. I'm going to get us started. Nicola, I'm going to pause. Just chime in if you think I'm missing things, but one of the first things we wanted to do when we looked over all of the questions you all submitted prior to this event, they are fantastic questions, but a lot of them centered around a couple different things that are more review-type things, so I do have a few slides because as many of you may have gotten wind of, the entire application season has really drastically changed in the last two years, and this year's application that you guys are going to be filling out will be the very first time there's been major changes to the main ERAS application in something like 15 to 20 years, so it does look a little bit different, and I will say there were some questions on there that asked about kind of the structure of last year, and that has changed, so I'm going to try to delineate some of that, but we can certainly try to elaborate more if that comes up in the chat, so here's a slide that I took directly from the AAMC. It is widely accessible. I can't remember where this one is from, but there's a whole section about updates for ERAS, and some of the big things I want to highlight prior to this current academic year, you really were able to list an undefined number of experiences. If you wanted to list 90, you could list 90 different individual experiences and then tag them to different categories. This year, you will be able to list a max of 10, so that is extremely different, and the thought process is that that allows you guys to choose really what's meaningful to you and give us a better picture of you as a person as opposed to just listing every little thing you've done through undergrad and medical school. It also really does allow us to do a more holistic review as program directors because, you know, if there's 90 things on your CV and on your list, we really cannot feasibly get through all of those for every single application. In addition to those 10, you're going to have the ability to select up to three that you think are really your, like, top, like, I want to highlight these and write a little bit more about them and why it was meaningful for you. Another big change is that things are going to be more standardized, so in previous versions of ERAS, when you listed an activity, you kind of got this open-ended comment section to write really whatever you want. Some people wrote nothing. Other people wrote an extensive paragraph. Now there's going to be various different categories and different things that you write and that it will prompt you to write that standard across all of those different 10 experiences. And so, again, making things more consistent, making us able to better review your applications in a timely manner. In addition to that, they're going to be able, there's going to be different categories, so that are all consistent, so volunteer, work, professional organization, hobby are some of them. Let me think of what else. And then undefined experiences description, so again, that big kind of wastebasket bucket comment box, now you're going to have kind of a limitation and some direction where to go. So those are kind of some of the big changes. Other things I wanted to just kind of give a overview of are preferences. So for this current coming academic year, geographic preferences and program signals will be enmeshed within the main ERAS application. So for those of you who may be aware, last year PM&R participated in the preferences and the program signaling. However, you had to complete that supplemental application that was an additional kind of additional completion of things. And so this year they are all melded into one and are essentially all melded into one for all specialties. So from a geographic preference signal, you're able to choose two different things. So you can choose if you have a preference of the type of residency program that you're wanting to attend. So urban, suburban, rural, or no preference are the four options. And then you're also able to choose up to three U.S. census divisions. So that's how they've divided the geographic regions is by what the country defines as the U.S. census divisions. Or you can choose no preference. So those are the things from a geographic preference signal that you're able to choose from. And then another level of signaling are what's defined as the program signals. And so the intention of creating these things called program signals is that it's giving you guys an opportunity to really tell us that you really want to come to our program. Every year the number of applications for PM&R has gone up. It's getting more difficult to do a holistic review. And so this is just one more way for you to sort of tag us and say, hey, you're top of my list, especially for programs that we may not guess that on basis. So I can probably, for me in Cincinnati, people in the Ohio area are going to be applying to me because they're local and that sort of stuff. So I get that. But what I can't tell is if you're currently living in California and do school on the East Coast, that maybe your parents are in Cincinnati or you're somewhere in Ohio and you want to get back close to them. And so signaling is one way to that. For PM&R for this application season, you are going to get five signals. Last year had four. So we're increasing that by one this year. The recommendation and what we're asking every program to abide by is that you signal all the programs that you have interest in. So that means you signal your home program. If that's one of your top programs, you signal anywhere that you did your away electives, if that's one of your top programs or really any other programs that you might have an interest in. There was some confusion about that this year or last year, I should say. This year, that is a blanket statement from the AAMC across all specialties. So all specialties are abiding by that or should be abiding by that rule or that suggestion. And then last but certainly not least, just so you guys are aware of what we are being told as programs is that really signaling is not intended to really go past the interview to invite, the interview invitation. So it's really just getting your foot in the door, telling a program that you're really interested in them. And it's meant to just be helpful during that I want an interview stage. It's not supposed to be used after you get an interview. I know that there's programs may do that differently. We can certainly talk about that. But the intention is that once you interview, the signal goes away and that you're not using that to factor in to creating. Nicola, anything else you want to add that we've talked about over the last several months? Because I feel like this is a big area. Yeah, I think it's really important to just highlight those things that you already mentioned, Dr. Bulger. And as challenging as it is to be an applicant right now, think about it from the perspective of a program director. I'm like Dr. Bulger. We're in Houston, not a place a lot of people have been to or a lot of people know. And if I can't glean why you're applying to our program, it could be difficult to read your interest. So a program signal is an easy way for you to say, hey, I really like it. And you could use that as a way to explain why you want to come to Texas or why you have family in the area or something like that. Realize that they should only be used to guide program directors for interviews. And you, again, should signal any program you have an interest in. It doesn't matter whether it's home, away, whether you rotated there or not. If you have an interest and you want to use one of your five signals on there, use it. Someone had asked in the chat about internal medicine. So internal medicine preliminaries, internal medicine is not participating in program signaling. So when you're applying to physiatry, you'll have five signals to use. You won't be able to use any of those signals on preliminaries. Okay. Okay. I've got a couple more slides with some data. And so my blanket caveat to the next couple things we're going to talk about are we have some very basic data from our experience last year. I caution you and I say very basic data. We have one year. We don't know exactly a lot of things. So there was a lot of questions that you guys submitted that we just don't know the answer to. We're hopeful that over the next handful of years as we get more and more data each year that we're going to be able to answer some of those questions. But some of the stuff we just don't know. If you have a question, please put it in the chat. But we may just answer that we just don't have the data to know what to do with that. The other thing that we don't have yet, but there is talk of it coming on board by the time we get through this application season is right now we just have data from ERAS and the AAMC. So how people use signals, kind of the front end stuff. We don't have anything that links those to match data. So they're two totally separate buckets and we can't really meld those together with last year's data. Hopefully that will come on board soon. But here's what we do know. So vast majority of people that applied to PM&R last year utilized the supplemental applications. So did that additional thing, 93%. 615 of those applied to and signaled only PM&R. 320 applied to at least one other specialty. Or I should say at least one other specialty. So two total specialties. Vast majority of people sent the maximum four signals last year. So there's your 3.97 average with your standard deviation. The data shows that there was no association with the number of signals received by a program in the proportion of residents who identified a race, ethnicity that was considered underrepresented in medicine. There's no association between signals received by a program and the proportion of current residents that are various categories. So it didn't matter what your composition of your program was in terms of the number of signals that programs are receiving. And in PM&R, there was no difference in program setting in regards to the number of signals received. So whether it was university-based community, that kind of stuff. We've talked a lot about this on the committee that Nicola and I sit on. And I think some of that is because there's just such, in PM&R specifically, the geographic preference. Most places aren't just rural or just suburban. And there's a lot of overlap within a PM&R residency program more so than some specialties. And so some of those questions just aren't as helpful for us in general. And then this is the stuff I get a little bit of questions on. But again, just read it as a verbatim kind of data point. We've got a lot of questions on the list about how do I mesh program signals with geographic signals? Do you prefer that they align or does it matter? I can't tell you necessarily because we don't have the data for that. But I can tell you what people did last year. So if in terms of program signaling and geographic signals, so 50% of applicants who sent a signal that their geographic region aligned with their permanent address. So whenever they chose their permanent address to be in 42% aligned with their current medical student address. Applicants geographic preferences, 75% of people chose at least one geographic region or division preference. 24% chose the no preference. And then the program signal and geographic preference aligned. 87% of people last year had those two buckets aligning. So meaning they were choosing programs to signal that were within their geographic preferences they indicated. Now, the caveat to that is anybody who signaled that they didn't have a geographic preference, they totally took out all that data and didn't include that in that. So just to wrap up in the nickel, I'm going to ask you to comment on any of that, like just in general. But like I said, we don't have any data that links the pre stuff in the ERAS application to what the match data shows. We just don't have those relationships yet. And our data is limited in terms of what we know and what we don't know. I think, Nicola and I have talked about in various meetings. And I think with our other group of about 10 program directors across the country, I think there's a variety of ways people have used this. And I think simply put it, there's a lot of variety in PM&R programs and what they need and what their experiences are with the match process in general. It depends on location of the program. It depends on size. It depends on culture. There's so many non-tangibles. But I think in general, we all as program directors agree that these changes, we're hopeful that they're going to help us with a holistic review and be able to better review all applicants and give more applicants a fair shot at kind of getting that look because it's more streamlined. So that's really the background behind all of these changes that are driving things. Awesome. If you are all open to it, we wanted to present some questions that had been posed. Me and Daniel are going to kind of go back and forth. So I'll start with the first question, and then Daniel will take the second question. Feel free to use the chat to put in any questions you want. We'll be answering them in real time and highlighting the ones that we think are very important. So question number one is, are you supposed to do both the urban and suburban signaling and the U.S. Census Division signaling? Or is it one or the other? Or how does that work? So you can do, when you do the geographic signals, you can have up to three U.S. Census divisions in the United States that you can pick from as a geographic preference. Now, if you apply to a residency program and they're not in that preference signal, or they're not in that geographic area that you signaled as a preference, we won't know that you picked that. So if, for example, you pick areas that are like the Northeast, the Great Lakes, and Pacific Northwest, me as a residency program director in Houston, I have no idea that you geographically signaled there. I only know that you geographically signaled if my program is within your one of your geographic preferences. Right. And then you can submit a preference for like urban or suburban settings. I'm not aware of any PM&R programs that are in a rural setting. And I'm not we like Ashley said we don't have much data to know, you know how much residency program directors and leaderships are are using these so you know let it reflect your true preferences you know programs are going to make up that what they do. Anyone has anything else to add we can go on to the next question. How should you choose your geographic preferences, if you have interest in programs all across the US. I think we don't know, it's a hard question we've talked a lot about this I think if you truly don't have a geographic preference what they say to do is choose no geographic preference. And I think that's what we were, we've talked about as a group. But we really don't know from a data standpoint, this is all just a bunch of people with talking about their experiences with one year of this. I agree. If you really don't have a preference and you're willing to go anywhere, don't put a preference. If you have a preference, put it down, like don't overthink it. Awesome. Should you use your program signal for only your aspirational programs, ones that you think are the ones you're going to get or use one on a backup program. That's probably the million dollar question and like Dr. Bulger said we don't really know. So, what some data that we have that Dr. Bulger didn't share is that I think, you know, one program in the United States got like 120 program signals. And one program in the United States got like 20 something signals. So that was like the max and the min. And so how you choose to divide your program signals is up to you. Obviously, the more competitive programs are going to get more program signals and the programs that are less competitive or in less desirable geographic locations are probably going to get less. So, um, you know, divvy them up at places where you feel like you would really want to go and really want to make sure those programs review your application. If you're looking at the program signal as a way to try to make sure programs review your application. I think that's the best way to utilize that tool. Dr. Bulger. Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing. I think, um, yeah, we just, we really don't know. Sorry, I was reading the chat. Remind me what like Talking about whether or not you like how you should divvy up your program signal. You put it all in aspirational programs. Yeah. Like do two aspirational programs and three realistic ones. Yeah, I think it's, it's totally up to you. I think I always advise the students where I'm where they're coming from Cincinnati to To do what their heart wants like do what they think they want at the beginning of application season. I think other thing we recognize is PB's is like Just because you signaled us and use one of your five signals doesn't mean at the end of the day that you're going to love us like, you know, you may go to that interview and all of a sudden you're like, wow, this is not the program for me. I don't get the touchy feelies. I don't feel like I fit in here. It's just not my vibe and that's okay. That's why it's meant to be only for that first stage and not carry through But yeah, I think, I think it just depends on the program, how they're going to use it. I know you know a lot of the smaller programs that are on our group said basically everyone who signaled got an interview, just because they had less signals. And others that was definitely not necessarily the case because they just got so many more. And so it really just depends on the makeup of the program and and a lot of that. With the 300 characters you get to use to describe your preference. Should you mention specific cities or states or just keep it very broad. Specifically regarding the geographic preference. Realize that anything that you put in that text box could be seen by any program that's in that geographic area. So, That's a great piece of advice. And realize that these US Census divisions are pretty big. So, you know, if you apply to the one that Texas is in and you say, I only want to go to Texas. How are the program directors in, you know, Louisiana, Florida and Georgia going to look at that probably not positively. So tread carefully. Who had a good question. She said, when do you do your signaling in regards to the time given when you submit your errors application. Correct. So it's in that first phase when you're you're submitting. So I want to say that I don't remember what your guys's deadline is it sometimes sometimes mid September. I know we get access to it late September. But it's all in that first batch when you when you do that initial submission. And I would say, pick them in that initial submission as much as you can, because all of us get real busy. We do a lot of reviewing in those two weeks. And that's going to, you know, those first two to four weeks. And that's going to be the big bulk of when we're looking at applications. All things being equal. Given these three candidates, how would you rank them. So the first one is One who selected your region. The second one is one who selected no preference and three one who selected a different region from your preference. Well, we won't know if you selected a region that's different because It won't show up to us. So that choice is automatically out. So then it's between Who knows, that is a You know, question. We don't really have data to provide any answer to. I would, I would say to piggyback off of that, like we've talked about with a couple different things. I think it probably depends a lot on the program. But I would say, you know, if you selected a region that's different. You know, we won't know if you selected a different region from your preference. You know, question. We don't really have data to provide any answer to. I would, I would say to piggyback off of that, like we've talked about with a couple different things. I think it probably depends a lot on the program, you know, I think Those, you know, there's definitely programs that are, you know, whether it's smaller or tend to recruit more regionally that might put a little stock more stock in some of those individual program signals or geographic preferences. But that may be totally different. If you go to a different program. And so I think that's a very individualized thing. And so I'd go back to the, you know, Do what you want. This is meant for us to be able to see what you want. I know we all you know in medicine. We all play the game. It's a match. It's weird. It's a whole weird process. But it really does the goal of all of this is aimed at being in your favor and helping you guys so Any other sorry I'm like so behind on all these questions. I'm trying my best to answer them with slow typing. Any other questions regarding programs signaling just put into the chat. I think it might be good to move on to the meaningful experiences section. So we can get our panel to to kind of talk about this. So, question one is with our meaningful experiences. Should there be an even distribution of leadership advocacy research and academics or put down just your favorite ones. What are your recommendations. Robbie. Can you repeat that. Sorry. I was also trying to ask answer a chat question. Multi tasks. That's right. I'm sure there'll be an even distribution of leadership advocacy research and academics or is it perfectly appropriate to be skewed one way or another. If that's where what you think is most important for you. I think it's okay to be skewed if you're if you if your experience as a medical student and your passions are skewed one way. I think that's totally fine because That tells us who you are. That's, that's what I want to try to figure out is what you're passionate about. And again, it's like speed dating in a lot of ways like do your passions, you know, mesh with with my programs passions and our strengths. You know, for example, I've been interested in medical education. Shocking to no one for a long time. And so, you know, I wasn't going to go to a residency program that Didn't have somebody that could be a mentor and that could help, you know, kind of form that and help aid My growth in that. And so I think mine would have totally been skewed in education type things even coming from medical school. If I was applying through this, this sort of rotation cycle. So I think it's okay. They may depend. Again, I hate to say this for like every blanket answer, but probably depends a little bit on the program to, you know, if you have a big research program that you know is focused on research and has all sorts of features perhaps What a research thing in there. I don't, I don't know, like we're not being focused on research. So I think we're just trying to figure out who you are, though. How many PM&R experiences should be highlighted versus other specialty type experiences. I mean, I don't think there's a magic number. Right. It's not like if you eat five pieces of licorice, you're going to get a residency interview. I would be true to your experiences. Right. Don't make them out to be more than they really are. Because if you put it on your ERAS application, odds are someone's going to ask you about it. And we can tell if you are fluffing something up to be more than it really was. We've learned how to do that in our time as program directors. But that being said, you know, we understand that applicants come to physiatry without necessarily having a home program to rotate through or not having the ability to do away rotations or maybe only having limited opportunities to shadow somebody in clinic for a few weeks or something like that. And so we get that not everyone is going to have the most robust previous exposure to physiatry. What we're really looking for through your experiences is that you understand the field, that you understand the scope of the field, you know, you know, what, you know, what you're looking for. You know, and you have an understanding of the types of patients we serve and what we do on a day-to-day basis. That's what we're looking for through those experiences. And we also use those as talking points to better understand your motivations and, and, and future goals and so on. So there's really no magic number, so to speak. It's, it's more about the quality and the nature of your experiences more than the quantity. not a deal breaker in our fields because we know that people figure us out at different points. All right, should the three most important important experiences be PMAR related or do you have some leniency with it and maybe an example of a non-PMAR experience that you've seen in the old application that you think would be a great three most important experience just to give an example? I'll go back to like anything leadership. I mean I again I'll harp on that a lot and I tell my students like if if you can something that's you know leadership or that spans multiple experiences and shows that you you know didn't just do kind of a I signed up to do this one or two at a time activity but like I really delved in and was part of this whatever for six to twelve months. I think I like that kind of stuff. Yeah, agree. I mean there's tons of things that show off like your leadership or your other personal traits that are not PMAR related, right? Like things off the top of my head. Did you serve in a branch of the armed forces? Were you an Eagle Scout? You know, did you you know participate in a you know religious or civic organization for like the better part of 15 years growing up, right? Like I used to love and well not used to I love when people talk about how they like grew up doing some sort of like folklore dance related to their like ethnic community because I did that when I was a kid. So like I learned about all sorts of different like Indian and Pakistani dances over the last couple of years talking to people about the different folklore dance that they grew up in. So like if there's something that you did for a long time and you find it really meaningful and it's a big part of who you are, I think that's cool to highlight. It doesn't have to be physiatry related. We know there's more to you than just your interest in physiatry. If I may jump in, I think the key here is passion because when you're when we're seeing five to ten interviews, things are going to get really boring. So when we talk about something you're passionate about and it's oozing out of your skin, we're going to get really motivated to want to talk to you, even if it's something we know nothing about. I do not dance. But if someone was really passionate about dance and the same, I'd be like, oh, tell me about it. Like we'll have something that will be interesting and different. So I think that's perfectly fine as long as your face is going to light up the same way when your best friend or your child walks in the room. Maybe not like that, but, you know, if your face is going to light up, that's what we want to see with those meaningful experiences. Yeah, I agree. You know, as much as you all try to, you know, separate yourselves out, everyone is often trying to highlight their academic accomplishment. Everyone is trying to highlight the like case report that they did at AAP or AAP or something. And that's fantastic that you have those things. But like none of that is necessarily a ticket to you getting into a residency program. Right. Like Dr. Kossi said, want to see that passion. What makes you light up? What makes you motivated? What is the type of thing that you're going to do as a resident that's going to keep you grounded. Right. And keep you healthy and successful as you go through residency, which is a challenging thing. So we want to know about your personal experiences and your hobbies and your interests that were very formative in who you are as a person, just as much as we want to know about your interest in design. Moving on to next question. If things were relevant from undergrad to PM&R, should we include them in our meaningful experiences? If they're your top experiences, then yes. Sorry, that's a really bad. I mean, I think if they make your list of top or you talk or do you think that individual is talking about those three that you can live, like write more about? Not sure. Okay. I would say like kind of how we alluded to earlier, I think it can be a mix of all different types of activities in those top 10. And same thing I would say with the meaningful or impactful, I can't remember what term they're using for those top three that you can write more about, but pick what's meaningful for you. What talks about you as a person and what type of physician you want to be. And those may be very different things. Some person might say, my most meaningful experience was I trained for and ran an Ironman. And I prior to that had never run a mile. Like that's huge. Like that may mean, while doing medical school and that's them and that's what they're most proud of. And that's okay. Awesome. I think so as we transition from this into the personal statement section, there is a question that kind of transitions well, how do we balance not rehashing everything in the personal statement in our meaningful experiences? So if you've got your top 10 meaningful experiences that you've really expended upon, should you mention it in passing? Should you somewhat rehash in a different way? Or what is the approach? Think my gut says, don't rehash it at least to a large degree, because if you're putting it in the meaningful experiences, we're seeing that already. It definitely could see situations where there may be some overlap or some mentioning or like using it to give an example of a, you know, a trait that you're really proud of, or something that you're really passionate about. But I don't think you need to describe it necessarily in both places. If I'm interpreting that question the way it was intended. I would, as I interject as well, I think you can allude to it, but I wouldn't expand. Like, for example, you're talking about something where the story of this research project was so important to you, you, like in their meaningful experiences, you're going to describe what you did, but in the, and you may be talking about the impact. So if you didn't talk about the impact, maybe write in your personal statement, or to simply mention as I detailed in my meaningful experiences section, blah, blah, blah, and then just take the next turn to something else. So don't rehash it, mention it, but expand only if you haven't expounded upon it elsewhere. I think we have one last question for the for this section. Should I write something here, as in the, your meaningful experiences section. Should I write something here, even if it did not truly impact me but may sound interesting on paper, just to sort of fill in the fill in this fill in the box. I'm totally waiting. Be prepared to talk about it. You know, um, you know, I guess this is the end of one right. I'm a program director at one program. Right. I realized that not everyone may be willing to talk about certain experiences that are most meaningful to them. And from my perspective, if you fill out like 10 experiences and three most meaningful experiences. That's not necessarily more valuable than someone who filled out five experiences and two meaningful experiences. Right. It's more about the quality over the quantity. Right. And if I can get a sense of that quality in whatever number of experiences you listed and how you talked about them. I'm there. I don't need you to have 10 and three. I'm looking for that quality, not the quantity. The only thing I add to that is, if I get a sense that you're in genuine or you did, like, that's going to hurt you more than if you just kind of picked what was meaningful for you and like I, and I think most program directors are like this we're pretty good at teasing things out and we know as students that you're trying to play the game like we're not immune to that we get that but I think. I don't know it feels bad to me when I sort of catch a student in that. Some students are better at hiding it than others I will fully transparent, and some I probably don't catch when they were totally just making something up for me but but be careful you don't get caught. It's really bad advice. Don't put it down because I think you're just only going to get caught, because why was it impactful to you like, why was something that was so cool that you think is cool not impactful because maybe it's not really that cool because you yourself don't believe it. So just put down the things that were actually impactful because you're going to get caught in some sort of lie or just we're just, you won't even realize when we're like yeah that was kind of a weird experience talking about their favorite research project that they did nothing with or out. So, Daniel you want to take the next one. Sure thing. Are we ready to move on to the personal statement. Questions. Let's do it. All right. How many experiences slash activities, should we weave into the narrative to avoid a rehash of the experiences section we sort of talked about this before. Should personal statements be written differently now that we have the meaningful experience section. That's a really good question. I know we're all like having an eye. I think I'll tell you, I'll tell, I'll tell people what I try to like advise my students and this isn't obviously the previous application cycles and take it or leave it but I tend to advise them to think about like why they want to go into PM&R and what traits and kind of meld all that together to kind of describe who they are. Yes, some of that may overlap with some of those meaningful experiences I think for sure, but I would use personal statement, probably similarly to what I've told people in the past is just, you know, tell me what you're tell me why you love PM&R tell me, you know, all those things and that may or may not be related to one of your, you know, most meaningful 10 experiences, because sometimes they're not sometimes it's a patient sometimes it's a family member experience sometimes it's a personal experience that aren't necessarily something that you would put in those top 10, you know, quote unquote med student experiences. Does anybody else have other thoughts. I mean just speaking from the perspective of somebody who recently applied to residency and had this very same question. I can tell you that I wrote two personal statements. The first one I wrote in February, when I tried to do the wrong thing and I tried to weave in as many of my personal experience or meaningful experiences into one narrative. And I wrote a completely different personal state my students who are on this chat right now heard me talk about this earlier today. My, my department chair for my university took the two and when we met in July and said, this is the worst personal statement that I've ever read from my original one, and this is the best personal statement that I rewrite that I've ever read on the second one because he said that. So the first one where I tried to weave everything together is very disjointed there's no clear narrative it didn't have an idea of who I was it was a rehashing my CV. But the second one where I took two or three major things for example, Dr. Gardening was number one, I talked about. And I weave that through from start to finish. I related that to my research in physiatry which is my second thing, then I reached did about working in a community, working in a vaccination clinic so I took it from maybe five or six, seven experiences where I was talking about my entire CV, something much more compact and tight. Like Dr. Cussey said that, you know, a lot of this stuff is going to get repetitive. You don't have to have a lot of volume of words even if you make it compact if every word counts, then it's much more significant. So, this is something that I always tell people that mentor, be very realistic about what's meaningful to you, and what you can convey in terms of passion, because passion speaks louder than anything else. And if you just want to bloviate about something that you don't really know that much about or you're not too passionate about it will come through, and people will see and you will show your face on during your interview day, you really want to make sure it's really meaningful. So it doesn't have to be a lot. Really take the time to reflect about it, you have a lot of time before your personal statement is due, and dig into what really makes you you put that into your personal statement, and make sure it ties together. We like short, simple, sweet, and concise. Remember, we get like 400 500 some people get more than that applications, and we really do try to read the vast majority of them. And so, you know, I always will say like, if you go past what I think is a page or I start dwindling, I kind of stopped reading I just don't have time so please. That's my biggest thing. Thank you for your insight that's awesome. Next question, and I apologize some of these are repetitive. So let's just we'll just roll with it. How focused on my PM and our experiences should this personal statement be, or should we talk about other experiences as well. I think we answered that a little bit earlier. I mean, if you're not PM and our experiences are the reason why you want to be in PM and are. I mean, I'm talking about not being in a rotation kind of experience. That is what you should write over there because, like, you know, Raza was just saying, it really, it has to show what your passion is. And if you're trying to create something which is not what really comes from within you. Most people can read that in a personal statement. So, try to avoid that as much as possible. But, yeah, definitely non PM and our stuff is relevant. Sometimes they're the most interesting personal statements to read, because sometimes, just when you focus on PM and I, it becomes repetitive. And you don't stand out. And sometimes the things which make you stand out in a crowd might be something which is so totally out left. Yeah, yeah. Agree. I think going back just remember that everybody's a little different and kind of who they think would fit with their program. And so, you know, I've definitely heard and I'm curious what the other ladies on the call think. But, you know, I think there has been a huge trend to talk about injuries, illnesses, different things. And I think many of us are truly beating our heads. I'm glad you're doing that to Nicola. But, you know, talking to some of my buddies who review a ton of these, we're like, that is not standing out anymore. There's so much use of that. And I get that that may or may not be why what, you know, introduced you to the field. But I may caution you on using that as a like large, huge chunk, because it's really, really commonplace right now. Yeah, I'm really biased. I will. So, the end of one, do not write about your ACL tear. Please do not write about your ACL tear. Now, I will say that I read personal statements where people talked about an illness that they had that led to an exposure to physiatry. I will say that I read personal statements where people talked about an illness that they had that led to an exposure to physiatry or an illness in a family member that, you know, sort of solidified and became, you know, like a very much like a motivating force for them to go to medical school and pursue physiatry as a career. That's absolutely appropriate. Don't hesitate to talk about your personal experiences related to healthcare. If it's relevant to like who you are, just like many of the commentators have said, but for the love of all that is holy. We get so many ACL tear personal statements, like every time I get one, like, it's like a joke, almost, you know, and I can guarantee that you probably have something so much more interesting to write about than, you know, how you rehab that ACL tear. One other caveat, along with the injury part, is that sometimes people will state, oh, I had an injury in high school, ACL, whatever it is, in college, and they'll say it inspired me to do physiatry and then there's nothing on their CV until third year of med school or end of third year. Clearly, that doesn't make sense. So, if you were truly inspired as an undergrad and then you're doing all this research and you're working with a physiatrist from that point on, yes, I agree with you, but that just seems very disingenuous. So, I think a lot of people don't write what you think we want to hear. I think I would write what actually happened because the truth is a little bit more interesting, more interesting than what you realize. And talking about, hey, I was walking in the hospital one day and this physiatrist just was nice to me, you know, and we started talking and they said, you better go into my field and I just followed them along like a puppy dog is kind of a funny story or like something interesting, which is what happened to me, you know, so that's a much more interesting story than my fake story that I probably put in my personal statement back then. Yeah. My personal statement was about how my grandfather was a cobbler and how my father was a luthier and like how that family connection to like work with hands led me to be an osteopathic medical student and how I found physiatry, right? So, you know, there's, like Raza said earlier, like, you know, how do you use whatever hobby or interesting family scenario or whatever it is that makes you you, how do you weave that together to give a story that shares some uniqueness about where you're going to go and what you'll do in the future? All right, we've got three minutes left. We wanted to stop at 8pm. Do we have any random questions? You can rapid fire in the chat. While you're rapid firing in the chat, I just wanted to state what we're going to do is all the questions that were in the chat, we did not get to all of them, so we apologize. We're going to grab them and then come together as a group and get a unified unified statement that makes sense for you all and then we'll be able to publish it somehow some way with Amy's help, and it'll be a reference for you all. So there seems to be good advice from from our group here. And not bad advice from people other than us. Randomly you can ask any question. Okay, I'm gonna I'm going to take this personal statement custom for each school and personal flair or one general statement. I don't think you need a totally separate personal statement for each school like you know right one from scratch for every single program. But certainly if there is a real meaningful connection and you want to draw our attention to that and remind us of who you are. I don't want to get in there it's just one more thing but I would caution against trying to like, go to the our website and try to regurgitate and like, you know, you have a great neuro rehab program or you know or whatever, like we're promoting on our things So, it seems disingenuous, to be honest, so, but things like, hey, I rotated there and I had a great experience with the residents, that's fantastic. Because not always is the person reviewing your application, necessarily someone you've interacted with a lot and so they may or may not remember that if it's a big program or, you know, depending on all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I remember the personal statements that like took verbiage from our website verbatim. Not a good look. Also, you don't need to flatter the faculty at the program. That's also not a good look. A lot of these just fall under the category be genuine, like, like, we're proud of our programs and each program is proud of different things. But we're trying to get to know you guys and know whether what is important to you meshes with what's important to us. So, looking at some of these other ones. You mentioned about whether or not they could talk about like being a parent in their application. And I say, absolutely. And the reason why I say that is because you need to find a residency program that's going to support you as someone who has a family. And I think you should be up front about, you know, maybe having limitations because of where your spouse works or, you know, proximity to family who's helping with childcare or something like that. It's okay to be transparent in fact it's preferred. Right. And you want to be in a place that's going to support your life. So, I, if you're a parent and that's meaningful, absolutely share that. Right. And I think like, or anything like even if it's not parent but it's something else I'll give the example of one of my now current residents who has a chronic form of hematologic, oncologic, you know, disease and is, is, it's going to be with her for the rest of life, you know, she has appointments she needs to go to and that sort of thing and so she melded that very nicely into her personal statement and we went back and forth about whether to use that or whether to be transparent about that but again we had the exact same rationale, you want to find a program that's not going to change you're never going to that's going to be part of you for the rest of your life and you need to find a program that's going to support you with that. And so I think that that's that'll make your life better. It'll make our life as program directors better. I think it's just, I would never have a problem with that. And honestly all of our program directors in our program have young kids so it gives us something to talk about. We always latch on to like I feel like kids, but. So, what's the time should we say this is the end of this show. Keep them wanting more and coming to part three and part four. If there are any specific topics that you want to be covered in part three and part four, just respond to the Twitter or threads because that's all the rage now. Thank you so much for those questions so we want we're happy to do it. And so we'll we have some ideas already so we'll have a good event that will be coming up in the next couple of weeks. And then just thank you to Daniel so he'll and Matthew part of the MSC for helping write the questions and getting the word out. Thank you to our resident counsel. And then finally thank you to our attendings Ashley Maya and Nicola. Thank you everybody for all the help and look out for the chats out the information from the all the questions that you submitted. So that way we make sure we answer all of your questions so thank you all this was an awesome turnout. So, thank you for giving us your time and hope to see you all on the interview trail.

residency matching process

ERAS application

personal statements

authenticity

quality over quantity

genuine

unique background

transparency in personal circumstances

interest in physiatry