what makes mudphudder so special?
It’s amazing how there are such dramatic differences in the mindset/attitude/tone of clinical departments from one medical center. You can walk into one department and find generally welcoming, laid back faculty (as laid back as possible in academia, I guess) and then into another department and find generally tense, sardonic faculty. I’m so used to the people who work at my institution who, I can now say with some level of information, are generally warm and laid back. It’s been a bit of a shock meeting some of the more not-so-welcoming people in the field. Over the course of the last 8 days of traveling–from one coast to another–I have been interviewing for residency positions and have met a lot of faculty. Mostly really cool, which makes me that much more excited about the future.
But in contrast to every other program I have interviewed at, at one program the first question of my interview day was “Why should we accept you ?–what makes you better than everyone else?” Not a good way (in my opinion) to start off an interview. You know, I suppose that’s not too bad for medical-type interviews, but I think at the stage of residency I would have expected more substantiative questions about me personally rather than having me try to out-do the other applicants. Competition is a part of academia and in particular medical training. We compete to get into top medical schools. We compete to get into top residency programs. We compete to get the top fellowships. And yes, we compete to see who can remember the most lines from the movie Top Gun in the O.R. But, this attitude by faculty of promoting competition between trainees is at best counter-productive. All it generates is a dog-eat-dog environment and no collegiality. And when I am sitting in a room of residency applicants–people who will be my future colleagues–the last thing I want is to start off by actively talking myself up in comparison to them.
Well, to this question I responded that I thought everyone who was interviewing on that day was special, worked hard and had unique qualities that would be of value to the program–and that I would not talk about why I am better than everyone else but would be happy to tell the interviewer about myself. I don’t know if that was a good or bad move but quite frankly, with all of the craziness (1,2) of last week, I wasn’t in the mood for it. Mudphudder–out.
