Interviewing for residency positions while completing a graduate degree: Considerations for graduate students, mentors, and program directors

Abstract

The pipeline of new clinical medical physicists in the United States includes graduate education followed by residency training. A major bottleneck occurs as students on the verge of completing their advanced degree programs seek positions in residency training programs; for example, in 2022 between a quarter and a half of applicants did not enter residency training.[ 1 ] The origin of the bottleneck was the introduction in 2014 of the American Board of Radiology's eligibility requirement for professional board certification that mandated the completion of an accredited residency program. 1 The bottleneck acutely impacts graduate students. Impacts of concern include anxiety and depression, which are prevalent in graduate students across a spectrum of disciplines in the United States. 2 Other potential impacts include shortages of qualified medical physicists, which could in turn impact the quality, safety, and availability of patient care. [3][4][5][6][7] Although there is literature on navigating the medical physics education and training pathways, 8-10 there is little guidance for graduate students in balancing their limited time to be spent on the competing tasks of interviewing for a residency position and simultaneously completing their degree. In principle, this should be quite simple: Each student interviews with enough 1 For the intents and purposes of this editorial, we require only a crude bracket around the true value, which is not known. We took data on the MedPhys Match (run by National Matching Services [NMS] for positions beginning in 2022). 13 These data reveal that 133 of 264 (50%) of applicants matched to a residency. However, only 214 applicants participated in the match, and of those only 180 were ranked by at least one program (NMS calls this subset ranked applicants "acceptable" applicants; we use this term for consistency; be noted th-at we are unable to confirm that ranked applicants are acceptable or unranked applicants are unacceptable).A total of 133 of 180 (74%) of acceptable applicants matched to a residency program. Hence, these data suggest a bracket spanning 50%-74% of applicants, depending on the denominator selected. For comparison, according to the Commission on Accreditation of Medical Physics Education Programs (CAMPEP), 323 students graduated from accredited programs in 2020 (a figure which excludes nine graduates from DMP programs), 19 of which at least 50% applied to residency programs. We speculate that the reason for which the AAPM's value is larger than that from CAMPEP is that the former includes a backlog of frustrated applicants (who completed their degree in previous years and are attempting admission a second or higher time), whereas the latter excludes these individuals.