Some students arrived to med-school EM-bound and haven’t wavered.  Others are still vacillating between EM and one or two (or three or five) other specialties. Either way, at this time of year third-year medical students are awakening to the need to actually declare their specialty soon, and desperate for info to ensure success or hone the list of possible specialties.  

Faculty, meanwhile, are still focused on the MS4 class–advising outgoing students while interviewing incoming ones.  And the fourth-year class itself are either on interviews or biting their nails waiting for March, unsure if they are qualified to give advice yet.     

The whole set-up can lead to an information desert just at the time that MS3’s want to learn everything about EM and how to hit the ground running for their own application season.  So we have prepared an oasis of reading and resources for the early-bird EM-bound MS3.  Pick and choose from below, or just forward the link to this post to them.  Happy New Year!

As featured here before, EMRA and CORD collaborated on a student advising guide.  The whole thing is a font of evidence-based information on applying to residency in EM, but at this time of year for MS3’s specifically useful will be:

Chapter 1 on choosing EM

Chapter 3 on planning for the next few months

Chapter 5 on away rotation applications—bottom line: Prep hard and APPLY EARLY!

And Chapter 8 on competitiveness

Because EM is a particularly inclusive specialty–and striving to be even more so–it’s a good idea to include the Advising Students Committee in EM (ASC-EM) guide for applying as a person under-represented in medicine. 

Although we can’t really recommend it as a source for information, since none of it is vetted and much of it is apocryphal, exaggerated, or just plain silly, it is some kind of a reflection of the world we live in, so…Reddit can be a source of unofficial background info, and anyone advising students should be familiar with what’s there.  If ready for rabbit holes and random memes in addition to some good anonymous thoughts, one could start at https://www.reddit.com/r/emergencymedicine

On a more scholarly note, and so we can check off the “read more” box, third-year students can read through the Clerkship Directors in Emergency Medicine’s MS3 curriculum, to scratch that learning itch and to get ready to tackle CDEM’s MS4 curriculum as part of their home rotation reading over the summer.

For a lot more resources, including podcasts and a clerkship primer, go to this list prepared by ASC-EM.

Next month, back to the MS4s, with a discussion of how to handle something we all expect against but prepare for: No Match Monday. 

Author: Shannon Moffett, MD @BrickCityEM; Emergency Medicine Clerkship Director at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and Director of Undergraduate Medical Education for the Department of Emergency Medicine at University Hospital–Newark, on behalf of the CORD Advising Students Committee in Emergency Medicine (ASC-EM)