Program Director's Guide to Judge Your Character...

Recently, the Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors (AFMRD) published some detailed 'Tips-and-Tricks' for Program Directors to judge and pick the best candidates before placing them on the rank order lists (ROL) - and they were not talking about your USMLE Scores, but character: "Character is the trump card. It doesn’t matter what your USMLE scores are if you lack the character to be a family physician", says the guide.

Fortunately, for you guys, that document is public and tells you in pretty concise and clear-cut directions what program directors should be looking for. Since Program Directors are a close-knit community across the nation and will often share information from directors of other programs and/or specialties on ranking tips, this document could generally be applicable for any specialty.

Here are some interesting pointers given to Program Directors on how to judge candidates from ERAS applications (i.e. you!):

1. "Google them. You just never know what you may find"

- Agreed, luckily what I found on myself was a friend praising me on his site..lol..works for me ;-)]

2. "Google them again right before you rank them."

- Whoaa...Google's getting way to important...A Man is known by the company he keeps ....AND the Google results his name produces ;-)

3. "Don’t write off a poor USMLE record if everything else points to quality. Are poor scores accompanied by evidence of commitment to remediation"

- Hmm...low-scores take note and make sure you have a plan to show commitment to remediation - both on Personal statement and your interviews.

4. "Look for evidence of humility. Be wary of too many “I’s” in the personal statement. Any hint of arrogance is a millstone on our rank list. We have enough here in Boston already without adding to it.”

- lol, no comments


And Here are more that might pique your interest about how you might be judged during interviews:

1. "How did they treat the secretaries, and servers at the cafeteria ?"

2. "Listen to the residents and coordinator about their interactions with the applicant, especially during the non-formal parts of the interview day."

Maybe I should include the rest of the second part on Residency Interviews Tips Blog, meanwhile I urge you to Read the Orginal Document Here - my guarantee that it will be time well spent :-)


Besides Google, make sure your profiles on social networks such as Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, etc. do not indicate any unprofessionalism and negatively biases you in anyway - which should not come to you as a surprise.

This reminds me of a very recent incident at a University I choose not to name, a male resident was placed on probation after his coworkers found him posting shirtless pictures with his brand new sporty car.. LOL ..yea being a doc comes with plenty of warnings. I am not suggesting the Internet will only harm you - the Internet can also be used to "boost your character" - like displaying your professional or service interests by way of what you blog about, the type of communities you are active in, and getting rid of that atrocious profile pic, etc. ;-) .. I leave the creativity to your creative minds...


And if bad things show up when you Google your name - you wish the Internet had a "Clear all History" function just like the Internet Explorer did ;-)..