Thoughts on doing aways at USC or UCLA? < USC hardly interviews their away rotators<USC has 4 spots. 2/4 on average go to internals+research fellows. you are ranked higher as an internal if they like you even if grades or some other academics are not up to par compared to external interviewees. so difficulty mode is legendary doing an away there with no prior connections hoping to match there < If you want to match there
how will they know if you do more thn 2 aways lol>they know people who find these things out. even if theres no letter not on a transcript
yea but by the time you've submitted ERAS and programs are sending out interviews, how will they find out and how will it negatively affect you at specific programs? unless they all get together and start doing investigation work to piece together where you flew out for each away> if it were any other specialty i wouldnt worry but some of these academic derm people are quite strange people in past years they would take one minor thing you wrote about somewhere as a hobby and for fun try to get you to mess up and see if you were telling the truth by having a guitar set up (in person) because obviously you lied about that on purpose when you put all the effort into thousands of hours of everything else on your app that was gonna get you in to derm. some people in academic derm seriously frighten me from the many stories ive heard from trainees over the years and i wouldnt put it past them
programs will find out, whether it hurts you or not is not known, it is a risk you have to decide if you are willing to take>i dont have skin in the game but the APD, a relatively weak organization in the grand scheme of things in academic derm politics is playing with fire if they think they can try to selectively enforce it by outing random applicants after a cycle of a new policy like this for violating it given not all programs even listen to APD guidelines to begin with for choosing residents and they need to look in the mirror when it comes to them actually fairly enforcing policies that affect applicants across the board historically. it would probably descend into people pointing out hypocrisy in the past that they have committed with selectively ignoring cases of their own past students that they knew likely were not even following their own guidelines they wrote. something similar happened or at least accusations of hypocritcal ignoring of some standardized letter of rec thing in the past for derm apps when it was new on online forums, something something about new things get pushed but when theres nepotism it all goes out the window then people saying well you cant prove its nepotism in that case etc etc. not a good look for all involved. they know that, especially in the first year of implementing a new policy there will be lots of people not abiding by it so no one is going to specifically out and punish trainees who dont follow it for various reasons since itll descend into a chaotic mud slinging finger pointing game thatll get ugly online. and then people will blame the APD for trying something new knowing full well lots of people wont follow the rules anyways and claim its not fair etc etc