Month: September 2024

4 downsides to being an academic physician (the dark side of academic medicine)

Amanda Xi

Today’s inane image of the day:

Click on the image above (or link below) to watch the video!

https://youtu.be/llazT8TSJRc

In a previous post/YouTube video, I discuss why I stayed in academic medicine. But with anything in life, where there are benefits, there are downsides. As a medical student, I remember reading and hearing about how academic medicine jobs included a lot of promotion pressures [to apply for professorship; which is why everyone is hustling/stressed to do research] and lower pay. This sounded like a terrible deal, so I never considered staying in academic medicine beyond residency [I knew I wanted training at an academic environment, but it didn’t seem like a good long-term career fit]. Fast-forward over a decade later and here I am… in academic medicine [cue: face-palm emoji]. So even though I heard about the potential downsides of an academic medicine job, I decided it was still a good fit for me.

The 4 downsides of being an academic physician that I go over in the video are:

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6 pieces of advice for pursuing a career in medicine

Amanda Xi

Today’s inane image of the day:

Click on the image above (or link below) to watch the video!

https://youtu.be/XdhEu-aSJ1k

I went to an anesthesia resident conference recently and was approached by students who had come across my blog or watched my YouTube videos. It reminded me that maybe some of the content I put out there is useful and inspired me to record this video. Here are the 6 pieces of advice for those pursuing a career in medicine:

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Advice for applying to anesthesiology for Match 2025

Amanda Xi

Today’s inane image of the day:

Hi there from the other side of the Match process – it’s worth the hustle! Also… excited to be partnering with Blue Laundry for a scrub cap giveaway on my Instagram page 9/19/2024-9/25/2024.

If you’ve landed on this page, I assume you are an anesthesiology residency applicant or soon-to-be one. Please make sure to review my 2024 Match blog entry as my goal with this entry is to build upon my thoughts from last year and offer additional insights/tools to be prepared for Match 2025.

The elephant in the room – anesthesiology is becoming more competitive

I don’t think I would have matched at MGH if I had to apply again today with my application from 4th year. I do think that I would have matched somewhere in anesthesiology based on my overall application, but maybe not. There’s some component of randomness to this process with how competitive the specialty has become.

The NRMP 2024 Main Residency Match data shows that there were zero unfilled spots for 2000 offered positions. When I matched into the specialty in 2015, there were 28 unfilled PGY-1 (intern) year spots and 37 unfilled PGY-2 (advanced) spots out of 1600 total offered positions (4% of total spots went unfilled). Also, notably, when I applied there were 1859 applicants for the 1600 offered positions, so at least 259 applicants went unmatched; in 2024, 3034 applicants applied for the 2000 total offered positions. That left 1034 applicants that did not match into anesthesiology. That’s a 5x higher unmatched rate than almost a decade ago when I matched. Things have certainly changed in the last decade.

If you want to see the slides from my August 2024 ASA presentation, they are available here: https://bit.ly/3zb9IdH

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