I recommend an article in the Business Section of the NYT called “< a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/business/29doctor.html?src=me&ref=homepage">Study Shows ‘Invisible’ Burden of Family Doctors.” The piece reports that less than ten percent of medical school graduates choose primary care specialties. Note too that, generally, the lesser the compensation, the less competitive the residency. The converse is true too.
Blog Archives
The Making of Erroneous Assumptions
Claire Cain Miller’s recent New York Times article, “Why So Few Women In Silicon Valley?” is a good read with some great anecdotes. The subject is very applicable to the medical field.
Tags: April 2010
Physician – Writer
Sheri Fink MD just won the Pulitzer Prize in the investigative category for her article on doctors’ care at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Her article, “The Deadly Choices at Memorial” was published in the NYT in August of last year. Sheri was a colleague of mine at Harvard and completed the American Association for the Advancement of Science Media Fellowship several years after I did. Although Sheri’s accomplishments are clearly exceptional, her achievement demonstrates that those with an MD can accomplish a lot in ways other than clinical.
Tags: April 2010
Emailing Your Letter of Intent
In a previous entry, I recommended sending your letter of intent (LOI) both by snail mail and email – the latter if the institution has not explicitly banned electronic correspondence with them. If you are sending your letter by email, ensure that you send it in the body of the email – not as an attachment. Even one more step (opening the attachment) might impede your document’s being read.
Contact me for LOI editing help.
Tags: April 2010
Language Proficiency
A tip for your CV and the application process in general:
Unless you are prepared to conduct an interview exclusively in another language, use the term “proficiency” instead of “fluency” when describing your foreign language skills. You do not want to face embarrassment (or worse) regarding an overstatement of your abilities.
Tags: April 2010
Dr. Finkel is a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Medical School. On completing her residency at Harvard, she was asked to
stay on as faculty at Harvard Medical School and spent five years teaching at the world-renowned Massachusetts General Hospital.
She was appointed to the Assistant Residency Director position for the Harvard Affiliated
Emergency Medicine Residency where she reviewed countless applications, personal statements and resumes. Read more
