MS3 here--now that we see who matched where, who is the best person to do a research year with? Anybody have a great experience with their mentors or see a list of people who matched well? Saw the spreadsheet but not sure where to start. Any other good ones?
some of armstrong fellows go unmatched every year
do april and arash make calls for their mentees?>i doubt they need to
any other good ones?
Look at their websites and old fellows--scroll to bottom of this https://mostaghimi.bwh.harvard.edu/who-we-are/current-members/ <i would be careful as a lot of people who are not of that caliber as arash mostaghimi do the simple magic trick of disappearing people who didnt match or ended up pursuing something else afterwards to make their stats look better. look at what happened to the mt sinai person. none of us are truly shocked because that happens every year dozens or more places its pretty normalized in derm academia. without knowing anything about these people or how arash picks research fellows you can, from public sleuthing, find that many of these people already had several derm publications and thus letters of rec from academic derms without the research year, the ones who didnt go to top med schools were on AOA lists of their medical schools. again, what is your pre-test probability of matching and how can you improve it. that should be the question not necessariliy who is the best RY person to work with. << This is a very good point to keep in mind. Many research fellows now are those who in previous years would have easily matched based on stats (class rank, AOA, USMLE scores) alone even before starting the research fellowship. A lot of this involves being honest about where you stand in terms of your application before jumping in. Don't be surprised if certain PIs (not talking about Mostaghimi here because he's totally awesome) don't want to talk about certain fellows who didn't match or maybe moved on to another specialty. You'll very rarely hear about those people.
tally up the people who have been named dropped. thats who you should work with< if you do a RYwith one of those people, are you basically guaranteed to match?<what part of theres no gurantees to match do you not understand that has been repeated dozens of times. there are only pre-test and post-test probabilities. and these things increase your pre-test probability of matching<so youre saying theres people that work with people like arash and april and then dont match?<no. arash and april are the best of the best PI's in all of dermworld. a step below those people and you end up with extremely strong but non perfect batting averages. of the PI's who regularly have at least one med student research fellow a year and have done that for at least several years you can count on your hands the ones that have perfect track records. a pragmatic outlook is a strong research year mentor probably has had someone not match before on the first try at a minimum which usually says more about the process than about them as a mentor. arash and april understand as people with perfect track records more than anyone that literally any of their research fellows no matter how strong could just not match and the longer they go at it maybe that might be the case one day. its just probability.