by: Samantha J. Baker I am a PGY-5 General Surgery resident at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and returning from maternity leave for my second child as this blog post is being published. I a...
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Intern Year Chronicles: Six Months In
By Alyssa Brown, MD PhD It is New Year's Eve, and I am in a reflective mood, or maybe I am trying to dodge studying for ABSITE. Either way, I have officially made it through six months of residency a...
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Surgery Residency is Like a Family
By AlleaBelle Bradshaw, MD There are a lot of cliches from the interview trail, most of which are at least partially true. One of them is that residents and faculty will say something about how the...
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Trial by Fire
By Alyssa Brown I sat through orientation with a terrified look. We practiced placing central lines, arterial lines, and nasogastric tubes. They poured knowledge into us to try to prepare us, but I...
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The True Cost of ABSITE Prep
By Martha Godfrey Everyone thinks in dollars and cents when it comes to the cost of preparing for the American Board of Surgery In-Training Examination (ABSITE): $150 for a textbook, $295 for a que...
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Chasing “More”: The Cost of Applying to a Competitive Surgical Specialty
By Kelly Spiller During a posterior cranial vault expansion on my pediatric plastics rotation, I was assigned a simple task: to stand at the back table and obtain bone shavings from the skull flap. T...
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It Takes a Village
By: Ana Sofia Ore, MD MPH My journey away from home started before residency, when I moved to Boston to start my research training. I had fears of how welcoming the city would be to a hispanic woman ...
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Avoiding Bias in Letter Writing
By Dr. Chantal Reyna It has been shown that implicit bias exists within letters of recommendation written for medical students applying for residency. In regard to gender, female applicants were more...
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Common Sense Karaoke: Tips and Tunes for Internship from Our Playlist to Yours
By Sara Swango, Jeremy Kauffman, Erin Feeney If you are reading this and are a newly-minted surgery intern - congratulations! You’ve put in tremendous time and effort to arrive at this point and ac...
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A Reflection on My Intern Year
By Joy Ayemoba Today I am fewer than six weeks from completing my intern year. Like many of my peers the transition from medical student to physician was a difficult one at best. The excitement to do...