The UK Interview (Part 1)

My interview at University of Kentucky (UK) went fine, alhamdulillah. I had emailed the program administrator a few days before the interview to find out about the faculty that would be interviewing me…..I have this morbid fear of mispronouncing people’s names…anyways…I got the expected “I don’t know yet…you’ll find out the morning of the interview” reply. D and I drove down to Lexington…a nice and straight three and a half hour drive. The program had arranged for accommodations and we got to the hotel in the afternoon. The dinner with the residents the night before the interview was nice…all the candidates (there were five of us) were there along with two chief residents (and their spouses) and an intern. There were three IMGs including me and two AMGs…..the other two IMGs were from India and Jordan. The residents were all easy to get along with…and so were the rest of the candidates…although the guy from Jordan didn’t say much at all through out the dinner. I found out later that the poor guy had traveled over ten hours to get to Lexington. One of the AMGs was desi….I’ll call him the “talker”….he talked a LOT. When he first introduced himself to me I asked him where he was from originally….and he said… “Indian/Pakistani….take your pick”. So, call me weird or whatever but I just don’t like it at all when people say things like….”oh brown hair brown eyes…Indian/Pakistani…same thing”…..that just doesn’t go down well with me. Anyways I just smiled back and asked him where his parents were from…turns out they were from Pakistan…so he was Pakistani! Heres where I stop with my ranting and continue.
The interview day started at 8:00 a.m the next morning with the morning report which was well presented and very interesting. After that the PD gave a presentation about the program…which was mostly a rehashing of what was there on their website…and was boring. The PD somehow seemed a little distant but he did manage to get across all the progressive changes that had come about in the program over the past few years. From a little background reading that I had done on the PD I knew he was big on medical education and has quite a few research projects going on about how to effectively teach and evaluate residents during training. I had asked the residents I met the night before about the didactics at the program and they were all praise for their attendings in this regard. The emphasis on teaching is one of the things at the top of my list…that along with the fact that whether the residents have “full ownership” of their patients or not….because that is how one learns. I’ve heard people ask the question “do you get time to read?” from interns and residents…In my opinion, while that is important…but practically speaking I am sure there isn’t much time that one can read during their internship year….and even if there is…you’re so dead tired…you’d rather catch up on sleep…..which is where the entire “learning from the patients” comes in and the most effective way to do that is when you have ownership of your patients. I did see that at this program. Another thing that impressed me was what they called continuity clinics where the same faculty supervises the residents for almost their entire residency….this is a good thing too because every attending would have a different way of doing things…and well..if you have a different attending every other week…you’d not really be learning a whole lot but rather ending up learning each attending’s pet peeves. I ramble again!Back to the interview day…I had two 30 minute interviews with two faculty members. The PD did not interview me…I guess that’s how it works at the Uni based programs or does it?....may be the PD just interviews people who he thinks are real strong candidates. My interviews with the faculty went well….one of them asked the standard questions…Why medicine? Why internal medicine? Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years? Her and I connected when I told her that I wanted to eventually go into academic medicine and teach….She was doing a master’s degree in curriculum development and I really enjoyed the rest of our talk from there because it was more conversational then…until she popped the “how have you or would you handle a situation where you don’t agree with what a senior is telling you to do or is doing?” I think I managed to what DP would call “BS my way” through it…heh. The next interview was with this doctor from the allergy/immunology department. I knew he couldn’t really be bothered with the interview when the first question he asked me was “do you have any questions for me”…I hate it when they do that….somehow I feel it shifts the focus from you to the program and at the end of it all you leave feeling like they didn’t really get to know you any better as a person than what your application told them about you. He then went on to relate the strengths of the program and how he loved it there….it wasn’t all that bad….he did tell me about this formal research program they have at the university which no one had talked about through out the day….that was interesting.. I think the somewhat impersonal tone of this interview was part of the reason why I was a little queasy and unsure about how I felt about the program at the end of the day…and so the elaborate blog entry….I am hoping writing it all out will somewhat clear the fog in my head…..have to be off right now…the rest of the days story(and more of what I liked and did not like) tomorrow inshaAllah.