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Choosing a Residency

Haley S., M4

First, congratulations on your acceptance to Washington University School of Medicine. We are so happy to welcome you to our community as our colleagues and future outstanding physicians! Choosing a residency is a distant decision for your class. However, it may be something that is on your mind as you decide where to attend medical school. As a fourth year medical student applying into pediatrics and couples matching with my fiancé, who is matching into dermatology, I hope to share my experience and explain how WUSM has phenomenally supported us both in choosing and applying to our residencies.

From our first year, the WUSM faculty have been incredibly supportive as we both explored specialties. It is not uncommon for lecturers to offer shadowing and research opportunities at the end of class or for a cold-turkey email to blossom into a thriving mentor-mentee relationship. This extends to clinical spaces, where faculty have been eager to mentor us and write us strong letters of recommendation. Now as fourth year medical students, Dean Diemer and the Career Counseling Office have been out-of-this-world cheerleaders, counselors, and advocates. We would not be in the position we are now, in terms of number of interviews and finding our residency program fit, without this incredible support team. I hope I can assure you that wherever you want to go after medical school, WUSM will help you get there.

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What Medical School Can Teach You

Emma W., M4

Things I learned in medical school:

  1. Lists are an effective and efficient method of communication.
  2. Being in the hospital on clerkships can be hard, especially during the first couple of months. It is most analogous to starting a new job every 2-4 weeks, in a completely different role, with completely different people, and in a completely different place.
  3. Be kind to yourself, and know that sometimes the best thing to do when you don’t know what to do is to just show up.
  4. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Everyone has been a medical student once and done something embarrassing.
  5. Try to limit comparing yourself to others; whether that be in how you study, student groups, research, or on rotations. Remember that everyone has their own strengths and will grow into their own identity. There are many roads to the same destination, and it is not a race.
  6. These four (or eight!) years will go by in a blink of an eye, and at the end you won’t be sure how you got there, but you’ll know that you’ve grown with a wonderful group of people you are lucky enough to call classmates and friends. When you can, spend as much time as possible around the people you love.