Charles Lopresto, DO gives tips on how residency applicants can highlight their passions and extracurricular experiences during interviews. Prepared to talk about your research project? Know how to answer about your experiences as an advocate? Dr. Lopresto covers all this and more.
Charles Lopresto, DO, gives tips on how residency applicants can highlight their passions and extracurricular experiences during interviews. Prepared to talk about your research project? Know how to answer about your experiences as an advocate? Dr. Lopresto covers all this and more.
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Dr. Lopresto: I think it's important to focus on how you functioned as a leader, who you worked alongside, talk about partnership, talk about if it affected your community or had a positive impact on your medical student community or otherwise. I think those are the qualities that program directors are looking for.
Unger: That was Dr. Lopresto, internist at New York-Presbyterian Queens Hospital. In today’s episode of Making the Rounds, we’ll hear strategies from Dr. Lopresto on how residency applicants can make their passions shine during their residency interviews. He’ll go in-depth on how to highlight leadership, research and volunteer experiences to indicate you’re a good fit for the program. Here’s AMA Senior News Writer, Brendan Murphy.
Murphy: Welcome to Making the Rounds, a podcast by the American Medical Association. I'm Brendan Murphy, senior news writer at the AMA. Today, we continue our Meet Your Match series with Dr. Charles Lopresto, who is an internal medicine specialist practicing hospital-based medicine in New York. We're very glad to have you on the show. How are you doing today, Dr. Lopresto?
Dr. Lopresto: I'm doing great, thanks for asking Brendan, and thanks for having me. It's my pleasure to be here.
Murphy: Thanks for being here. Today we're going to discuss how residency applicants can highlight their passions and extracurricular experiences during residency interviews. This topic touches on what many program directors and faculty members often call an applicant's buckets. They typically include leadership, research, service and advocacy. To start, Dr. Lopresto, can you tell us your background heading into residency interviews? Was there a particular bucket on which you spent more of your time as a medical student?
Dr. Lopresto: Sure, so I am fortunate to have had a lot of great experiences as a medical student, but I think the one that I wound up highlighting the most was my leadership and advocacy experience. I was fortunate to be involved in the Student Osteopathic Medical Association at the time. I spent two years on their national board as their national research director, and that also gave me a title as the editorial board member for the medical student and resident and fellow section for the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association at the time. So, I was fortunate to have those experiences, and it certainly gave me plenty to talk about on the interview trail.
Murphy: And of course, your advocacy efforts have continued as you are a member of the AMA now as a practicing physician.
Dr. Lopresto: Correct, and those early experiences that I had as a medical student, I think they gave me a start to continue all of my activities within organized medicine. And I did make the transition to the American Medical Association and my state medical society more so during my residency and as an attending. So, for those listening who are medical students, just remember what you've started as a medical student, hopefully, you can continue to evolve that and add to your experiences as you go throughout your medical career.
Murphy: That's great insight and advice. Looking at this sort of broad range of buckets, are there specific questions applicants should be prepared to discuss when talking about these extracurricular activities?
Dr. Lopresto: So, I think everything is dependent on the applicant. I would say that when you're preparing for a residency interview, you want to feel comfortable speaking about the thing that you're passionate about the most. I know it's a challenge to try to tick all of these boxes off and make sure we have all of these experiences to make us competitive applicants. However, you may wind up feeling more passionate or more knowledgeable about one of them versus the others.
So, when you as the applicant are attending your interviews, you should really think about which are the ones that you're most passionate about, which are the ones that are easiest to talk about for you, and stick to those topics. You likely will not have an opportunity to speak about all the different things that you have on your application. So, picking a top one, two or even three that you can speak about comfortably and passionately is my advice.
Murphy: We're going to talk a little bit about each specific bucket here. What strategies can medical students use to effectively present their research experiences during residency interviews?
Dr. Lopresto: When you're discussing your research experiences on a residency interview, I think it's important to first be prepared. You definitely want to know your research inside and out. However, this is not the same process as submitting a manuscript for publication. You're not going to be getting feedback from your interviewer about how to improve things.
It's just important that you're able to speak about your research in a competent way and be able to field questions if they arise. I think it's also important to know your audience in terms of where you're interviewing. There are some programs or program directors for that matter who are more involved with research as individuals or as individual programs. You might expect that those individual program directors or persons in the program who are interviewing you might take more interest in diving a little deeper into the questions of your research. So, I would say for the specific programs that are a little bit more research heavy or are at institutions that expect you to do more research, perhaps be a little bit more prepared to answer all the fine-tooth details about your research. But in general, I would say know the main points of your studies, know the main points of where you presented, why you presented, who you presented alongside, and be able to speak about perhaps next steps that would be investigated in the research. That's a common topic that comes up as somebody who might be interviewing you.
Murphy: These interviews are scheduled and certainly time is finite. You talked about keeping it sort of concise. Is there information overload possible? Can you talk about your research experience too much?
Dr. Lopresto: Yeah, I think it's important to remember that people who are interviewing you for residency, most likely they're busy people in their own clinical lives, academic lives, and to be honest, they probably have not reviewed your particular application with as much detail as you might think. And perhaps they read the title of the research that you have published or if they had an opportunity, might have looked up where it was published and skimmed over it. But that's sometimes, I think, something that causes a lot of anxiety for medical students, where they think that somebody has really read in great depth and great detail about their publications. And most of the time, honestly, it's not the case. So, the first time that they might be really understanding what your research was about is when you're telling them about it during your interview.
So, if you keep that in mind, I think it's, again, reasonable to be concise and just give an overview of what are the main findings, what was the main study design. However, be prepared for that program director or individual who might have taken the time to go a little bit deeper and might want to ask you a question or two deeper into your research. But overall, I would say keeping things brief and focusing on the main points, main findings is useful for you. And you don't want to suck up all of your time in your interview focusing on the methods and the different statistical analyses of your research because that's going to take away from your other opportunities to shine as an applicant. It's great to be able to show your prowess of understanding of research and you might be someone who wants to go do research further in your career as a resident, but being a balanced applicant, think is overall a better strategy.
Murphy: You mentioned that leadership and advocacy were probably your strongest areas. How did you highlight your leadership work in residency interviews?
Dr. Lopresto: Yes, I think highlighting leadership work in a residency interview, there's different ways to do it. It depends on what you were involved with. For me, again, most of my extracurricular activities as an applicant were focused on leadership activities as a medical student. So, it was easy for me to talk about. There was a plethora of things that I could have spoken about, different projects I was involved with, different advocacy goals that we participated in as an organization. However, I think for most applicants, leadership on your application might be a few positions, possibly at your medical school or something more locally. When you're talking about leadership experience in those settings, I think it's important to focus on how you functioned as a leader, who you worked alongside, talk about partnership, talk about if it affected your community or had a positive impact on your medical student community or otherwise. I think those are the qualities that program directors are looking for. Medicine is a team sport and when you're going to be a resident, you're going to be on a team, sometimes in a hospital setting, and program directors want to know that you're going to be a team player and a leader capable of functioning in a high-paced residency environment.
So, I think focusing on those things that you learned from your leadership experiences that will make you a good leader in a residency environment are key to highlight.
Murphy: So how would you frame your leadership experiences during interviews?
Dr. Lopresto: Well, my interviews were a long time ago, so I don't remember the specifics, but I think I spoke about how my leadership experiences fit into how I viewed medicine and how I viewed what type of physician I wanted to be. I think that's a useful way to frame things. And I'm still the type of physician today that believes that evidence-based medicine is important and that all physicians should be active in organized medicine.
So having the leadership experience I had as a research director for a national student organization, it was easy for me to talk about those things and be passionate about them. And it really defined my outlook of how physicians and medical students and residents should approach practicing medicine. I think everyone has a different passion and a different approach to medicine and why they got involved. And most likely, I would hope that your leadership experiences that you participated in as an applicant would be related to your passions and perhaps have developed your way of looking at medicine or looking at the system as a whole. So, focusing on your leadership experiences and why you're passionate about them will come through to the interviewer.
Murphy: Medical students are often going to lead in a non-clinical environment. It might be a class president or class treasurer type position. How would you recommend they take that leadership experience and discuss its impact on care dynamics, even if they were not leading directly in the clinical setting?
Dr. Lopresto: So as medical students, you may have leadership experiences where they are not directly clinically related, as you're saying, Brendan, and that's okay. As I've stated, I think what program directors are interested in when it comes to you discussing a leadership experience is how are you going to function as a leader in the future, as a resident?
What did you take from that leadership experience, whether it was your class president or whether you were leading in some other way in the community that's entirely not clinically related at all. People put all sorts of things on their CVs and their applications. Leadership is leadership at the end of the day. I can give you an example. I'm a musician in my free time and I play saxophone, and sometimes I play with bands where there's multiple horn players and there's a certain element of leadership that comes through in having to play music with different people. That's a skill that you can develop, and people develop skills as leaders in all different parts of life. I think focusing on how you've learned about leadership and what you've learned about leadership and how you plan to apply that in a team-based setting during residency is really the key to try to highlight when you're on the interview trail for residency.
Murphy: That's a great example, Dr. Lopresto, and I would like to just take it a little further. A lot of people's experiences in these buckets, whether they're service or leadership or even advocacy, could take place totally separate from their medical school experience. How do you highlight these experiences from maybe a different part of your life in interviews?
Dr. Lopresto: Yeah, so as I was saying, think everything that you're proud of, that you dedicate time and passion in your life about, that makes you who you are. And that gives a program director a more balanced perspective of who this person is who's going to be joining a residency program. So, I think it's totally valid and acceptable and even appreciated by some programs to highlight things that are non-medically, non-clinically related as experiences. If you're proud of them, if you've been recognized in some state level, national level way for something else that you're involved in, go ahead and highlight it and talk about why you're interested in it, why you spend time on it. And also remember, we're all humans at the end of the day and we should be involved in other things outside of medicine. That's what makes us whole. That's what makes us balanced.
So, I think a lot of times, residency program directors are looking for people who are balanced, who are going to be resilient. You know we talk so much about burnout and moral injury and the stresses of training and the profession at large. I think it's important for us to keep other things in our lives and have some sense of balance. And it's also important to be able to express why those things are important to you and how they help you approach your work, your life, your balance, and maybe even apply some of those skills to the practice of medicine.
Murphy: So, you mentioned you did a good amount of work in the advocacy arena. When it comes to that advocacy work, what kind of advocacy experiences do programs typically find most compelling?
Dr. Lopresto: So, what's interesting to mention here about advocacy work, highlighting advocacy work as a medical student versus a resident, sometimes I actually give some lectures about the importance of advocacy in organized medicine. And part of my talk is understanding that you're not actually taught how to do advocacy in medical school, but you are expected to be an advocate as a resident. It's part of the ACGME core requirements to be an advocate for your patient when you're in residency. So, I think any amount of experience and participation in advocacy as a medical student is valuable to highlight because again, it's not part of any formal medical school curriculum.
So, if you attended a state or national advocacy day at your state capital or on Federal Hill or you met with a senator or an assembly person, or you attended a conference that had an advocacy component or have a leadership position related to advocacy, highlighting those things are extremely valuable as a medical student. I think that you will probably be in the minority if you are highlighting those things, and a program director will probably take great interest in you if you have a passion for that very early on in your career because most applicants probably are not bringing that to the table.
Murphy: How can students tie their passion for advocacy into a program's culture as they interview?
Dr. Lopresto: I think it's important to understand a bit about your program that you're interviewing for before you try to tie your specific passion into a program necessarily. There are some residency and training environments that will favor your involvement in organized medicine and advocacy, and there's others that may be a bit more strict and just want you to focus on academics and maybe we'll look at your desire to be involved in advocacy and spending a lot of time away from the program at conferences and varying other external responsibilities as a challenge. I think it depends on the individual program. I think it's worthwhile looking at very carefully what's written on the program's website, seeing if there's any message or sentences or direction about advocacy work related to the program from the program director's note or any place else on the program social media and possibly also reaching out to other past residents.
A lot of times people hear about residency programs or are interested in certain residency programs because they have somebody else that they know who are already in that residency program or have graduated from it in the past. I think it's a good predictor to say if you know someone else or another resident has been involved with advocacy work and has time and support from a particular institution to be doing that during your training, then go ahead and feel free to try to bring your passion for advocacy into that residency program. But I would say it's sort of a tough thing to do as an applicant because if you're going in and you're not entirely sure, you don't want to send the wrong message to a program director that would be “Hey, I'm interested in being a resident and a trainee and learning how to be a good doctor, but I might be spending a lot of time doing something else.” You might want to feel that out before you try to dive in and say that, of course, you're going to be doing a ton of advocacy work during your residency time.
Murphy: If you do just get those general questions about bandwidth, because they are hiring you to be a resident physician, how do you handle those?
Dr. Lopresto: I think it's important to be honest about your passions and desires and what you'd like to spend your time doing during your training with a program director. And I think this is what the interview process is about. Sometimes it's more of a conversation. You might learn that a program doesn't want you to be focusing on something that you're passionate about. And maybe you learning that might change the way that you rank that program compared to other places. I think most program directors probably want to hear that you're going to be fundamentally and primarily focused on learning and becoming a good resident, becoming a good physician first. And in terms of bandwidth, depending on the program, they might want you to focus on other internal things and how to improve the institution before they see that you are focusing on external things. But again, it entirely depends on the program, it depends on the program director and the culture there. I would say in general, it's probably safer to start off saying that your primary goal is to focus on learning. And then to, once you're there in the program, and somebody can really see what you're passionate about and that you're capable of putting more things on your plate then to think more about a conversation of bandwidth.
Murphy: The bucket we haven't touched on much is community service. Why is that important to highlight and how would you highlight it?
Dr. Lopresto: Community service, I think, is fundamental to, in general, in our practice of medicine. I think we occupy a certain space in society where we are there on people's toughest days of their lives, on their best days of their lives, and everything in between. And ultimately, that is a service to community at large when you participate in community service beyond what you're doing as a physician, it should be something that you're doing out of passion, that you're doing out of the goodness of your heart and wanting to improve the health or other aspects of your community. I think that a lot of residency programs do have community service built into their activities of how they're serving their community beyond just providing medical care and highlighting your elements of what you have done as a medical student to take care of your community, I think will only be appreciated by residency program directors who have a strong component of that built into your training to come.
Murphy: For applicants that might be a little light in one of the buckets, will that come up in an interview and how do you navigate that if it does?
Dr. Lopresto: That's a tough question to answer in the sense of … I think it might be very rare for somebody to point out directly to you that maybe you don't have enough experience that is relevant or that makes you competitive. I think a good indicator of whether somebody thinks you're quote unquote light in a bucket is if they don't really have a lot of questions for you. And if that's the case, I would say your strategy should be to make sure you know how to talk about what you do have on your application. And whether it's being able to expand upon certain research that you've done or expand upon, again, leadership activities or advocacy or whatever it might be, it's a skill that we have to learn as we go through the interview process of how to fill up time talking about certain things and also how to balance that time with other things that we want to talk about. So if you are an applicant who has less on their applicant than some of your peers, then just be comfortable talking about those things that you do have and passionate about it and you'll come across as just as confident and just as positive a candidate if you're passionate in those few things that you've focused on is greater than perhaps somebody with several experiences that they speak about poorly on interviews.
Murphy: It's also worth pointing out that programs don't expect applicants to be full in every bucket. They understand time is finite. And at this point, you've gotten to the interview. So, they think enough of you to bring you into the room.
Dr. Lopresto: Yeah, I agree. I think that that's something else that causes a lot of anxiety for medical students. Understandably, you're there on a residency interview. It's a very important next step for your career. But at the end of the day, a faculty member or someone conducting the interview, they should be treating you as a colleague, as a human being, as a future person who they're planning to work alongside and with. So, taking that perspective, getting yourself out of your shoes as a medical student and into your shoes as a future colleague to some of these people who might be interviewing you, I think will make you feel a little bit more comfortable and a little less nervous about the ways that people might be approaching things.
Murphy: What are some common mistakes students should avoid when presenting these experiences? In the end, we're looking to create a more polished and effective interview narrative. How do they go about that?
Dr. Lopresto: Some of the mistakes that I've seen are, again, focusing too much on particular details, especially when it comes to research. A common scenario might be an interviewer might say, tell me about your research. I say you did research on topic X. And that's sort of an open-ended question. And then an applicant might go do a deep dive into the entirety of the research project, perhaps even giving citations sometimes. And that's really overkill.
I think that's a mistake and it shows that you don't really understand that you should be presenting yourself as a balanced applicant and perhaps you're a little too nervous or you're not confident and you sound scripted. I think these are all mistakes that are easy to overcome with a little bit of practice. think one of the things I remember doing when I was preparing for my interviews was reading through all the items on my application and my CV and preparing a short answer and a longer answer about each of them. If you're capable of comfortably talking about all of your items in a short way and that you're going to be happy with and being able to expand upon them in a longer way that you're also going to be happy with, you'll walk away from the interview happier, and your interviewer will walk away knowing what you wanted them to know about each of those experiences. I think that's something that we get worried about or anxious about which is you walk away from an interview and you say I wish I talked about that thing better or I wish I had more time to talk about that other thing and the way to prevent you feeling like that after walking away from an interview is to have these different ways to talk about things it sounds a little funny and a little contradictory to what I was saying before to not sound scripted, but you do have to prepare. These are short encounters, sometimes 10, 15 minutes. So, as you go through your interview trail and you have multiple interviews, it does become easier. But even going into that first interview where you might be the most nervous, having a strategy of how to talk about something in a shorter way versus a longer way, I think is an easy way to avoid some of the common pitfalls.
Murphy: That's great advice. Do you have anything else to add for our listeners?
Dr. Lopresto: I would say the only last piece of advice is to enjoy the interview process, enjoy this time as a medical student. It's probably one of the last times you'll have this amount of free time to travel and to be without too many heavy responsibilities and things are about to change and enjoy what you can from your interview season. I hope you found all these tips helpful.
Murphy: Dr. Lopresto, we really appreciate you taking the time to share your insights with our listeners today.
Dr. Lopresto: Well, thank you again, Brendan. It's been my pleasure.
Murphy: This has been Making the Rounds. I'm AMA Senior News Writer, Brendan Murphy. Thanks for listening.
Unger: Don’t miss an episode of this special series as you prepare for your residency application. Subscribe to Making the Rounds on your favorite podcast platform or visit ama-assn.org/podcasts. Thanks for listening.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this podcast are those of the participants and/or do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the AMA.