All right, I'm Sarah McGill from the University of North Carolina. So today I'm going to talk about interviewing and sharing what you need, but more importantly, getting what you want out of this, all right? Getting what you need. All right, so we've all been there, right? Medical school interviews, please take me. Then there's residency. Okay, a little less so. Please take me. Fellowship, super competitive. Please take me. But now you are the product of the medical education cartel, and you are a scarce resource now. So it's not like that anymore. You are ready. You are skilled. Does anyone know who Philippe Petit is? Yeah. So he strung a wire between the twin towers and he walked across. He was a tightrope walker. And there's this line in this book that says, all his life he had worked to be here to do this. And I feel like that's where you guys are. You've worked so hard to be where you are, and now you're ready to really use those skills and advance the field. And we want you to get what you need out of your jobs. So interviewing, where? I'm a big proponent of interviewing at as many practices as you can, really, in different practice settings. Even if you think you want to go to private practice, interview at an academic institution, or vice versa, as we heard before, you never know what can happen. I'll tell this story that I interviewed at several different places, and a few years into my faculty position at UNC, I was the only gastroenterologist writing about this really weird thing called alpha-gal syndrome. Has anyone heard of that? Okay. Oh my gosh, you're all nodding. I'm so excited. So it's this really weird tick-borne illness that people who have gotten this tick bite can get this delayed allergy to mammalian meat, and because it's so delayed, four to six hours, they don't know why they're getting sick, nausea, vomiting, all that stuff. So I got this interview, I got this call, this invitation from a guy I had interviewed with a long time ago to write this clinical guidance on how to diagnose and manage alpha-gal syndrome, and really it was the very first one in the literature. I worked with an allergist to write it, and it got covered by Time Magazine, NPR, NBC News, like it was all over. So that was really from a relationship that I had made as a fellow interviewing, not a job that I ended up taking. Likewise, a practice manager about a year into my job called me and said, hey, one of the people that you worked with as a fellow is interviewing at our practice, small private practice, and I was able to tell them, no, no, terrible endoscopist. I wouldn't say this about hardly anybody, but I really did them a favor by sharing that insight, I think. So it works both ways. When, honestly, there's really no set. I think the earlier the better, but I have heard about people. So I met a guy at DDW once who, a partner at an Atlanta gastroenterology group who had already had this job offer to a medical student, and so the plan, no, I'm sorry, medical resident. So the guy was a first-year fellow, and they were already planning on him taking this job at this GI thing. So obviously, that's a really extreme example, but I've seen fellows interview at the end of first year or during their second year, during their third year, but certainly by the end of second year, you should be starting that process. How? So there's a lot of different ways. Personal contact is always great, but if you're wanting to go to a different region, you may not have those personal contacts. Just calling the practice manager of different practices can work. An email, email to the chief, to academic institutions, or even through websites for groups like Kaiser, but personal contacts are good. So sharing who you are, just practicing your pitch, just think about the story that you want to share. We all have a story about our training, our experiences, and how that's going to inform what we want to do and what we accomplish in whatever job, and your pitch may be different for different practices that you're interviewing. Always be respectful to everyone on your interview, from the front desk person, to the janitor, to the partners, of course. That's just in general. Don't want to be disrespectful any time. Be honest, and just share any particular interest or skill sets, and that could be like obesity medicine, bariatric endoscopy. I think my pitch was, I'm interested in endoscopic imaging and endoscopic education, and I just published this article in Gut, and that's what I want to bring to the academic sites, and then of course that was different for the private practices. So it does matter. I actually was in this fellowship interview thing, we were all interviewing different fellows, and we had all these amazing fellows that had great CVs and high scores and all these things, and I interviewed this one woman who just had her pitch down so well. She had practiced with her dog, with her partner, stuffed animals, like I'm interested in addiction, and I've got this master's degree, and I want to study and research addiction medicine and the intersection with liver disease, and I thought, wow. And so I go into the little lunch where we're talking about all our fellows, the fellows who interviewed, and the chief of the research fellowship goes, yeah, let's just offer her a spot right now, and I thought, gosh, that was really, she was a spectacular interviewer, but everyone was so accomplished, I was surprised. But honestly, more important than selling yourself is getting the information that you need, and this may not all happen in their interview, but all of the stuff you need before you, before at least some idea, right, before you get a contract. First of all, how many days a week will you work, and among which sites? What will be the breakup of endoscopy and clinic? How long are the endoscopy slots for procedures? That gives you an idea of how fast the unit is running, and then probably good to know, you know, when does the day start, when does the day end, and I can, I have all these on a list. Michelle, can we just email that out to everyone maybe, maybe, and we'll get it, we'll get it emailed out. All right, so you don't have to take pictures of all these, but will you oversee physician extenders, what's the breakdown of inpatient versus outpatient work? Nursing support. All right, so if you're seeing clinic patients, this, the patient notes and calls, they will be an outsized portion of your mental strain from your job. So it's really important to know who's helping you with these. Is it a nurse? Is it an MA? And what's the ratio of them to you guys, the faculty, or the partners? If they're, if they are nurses or MA, yeah, what's the ratio? And where are these support staff located? So if you're never actually with your support staff, sometimes it's easier to just do it yourself and just the communication is less efficient because it all has to be email or calls or whatnot. All right, call. What's the call schedule? How many hospitals do you cover on call? And then what's the first line for after hour calls? Is there a triage line? Is there a PA or a fellow that helps? Salaries and bonuses. So how are salaries and bonuses set? Wow, this panel has blown my mind because I thought private practice was all about RVUs and maybe it's not. So what's our, you know, what is it? What are the criteria for the salaries and the bonuses? What's the retirement plan, benefits? And then what's the salary comparable to comparable salaries in your region? And I'll show some data, but it's a couple years old. There's online resources, so let me go there, okay, yeah, Medscape. Medscape has a GI compensation report and it gives you by region. So I just pulled this up last year from the salaries in Illinois. Of course, these aren't completely accurate, right, because they're based on survey data. But here we go. Annual salary last year averaged 350, top earners 400. And these are, again, our salaries. This is not total compensation. ZipRecruiter and Doximity, other sites also give this data. So know this stuff before you're doing the interviews. Here's the AAMC academic total compensation data from 2023. And this does vary by regions. If you want a job in academics, I would say just go ahead and buy this data. It's some amount of money, like $400 or something. But it's worth it to know what you're worth, really, what the comps are, as they say in real estate. All right. And all of the salary, you know, is not, I don't think, the top salary in the world isn't as important as, you know, things to nurture yourself. One of those things is vacation, right? You don't want to get burned out. So how many vacation weeks a year, and what's the coverage plan for those? I did interview at one private practice where there was, like, no plan. It was, like, a hospital, employed physician, like, one physician, and I don't know, like, who's going to cover you during vacation? Nobody. So definitely do not go for that. And maternity and paternity leave, you know, what's the, what is the plan for that? Have they had experience with that? How much leave? Is it paid, unpaid? I think it should be paid. Of course, there's no, really no laws, usually. Most states don't have laws for family leave, but, for paid family leave. But paid family leave is important, right? You want to nurture your child. I've done this four times. I have four kids who are all really fun and beautiful, and you want to be there for your babies during that time. It's really special. All right, ownership. So who owns the practice? And if the group owns the practice, have there been talks to sell to private equity or a hospital system? You don't want to bait and switch, if possible. My brother-in-law interviewed at a private practice anesthesiology group, and first year, first year, they sold out to private equity. So all the plans he had made kind of were changed. And now, actually, that group has sold, has bought themselves out of private equity and are, again, owners. But you kind of want to know what's going to happen. Does the group or the private equity own the ASC, PATH, anesthesia? If they do, they control the staff, schedule equipment, and people who are in that situation might want to talk about it. It sounds not great for me, but do they own real estate, and can you buy into that? I have a patient who owned with her husband in urgent care and bought the real estate, and now they get a $20,000 check every month. They sold that practice to the hospital system, and that's the rent that they're charging for the physical location. So that can be a consideration. And then, of course, what's the criteria to make partner? How many years is it to make partner? Is the buy-in a lump sum, usually six figures, which requires a loan, or taken out of earnings gradually? Academics. Academics is a little different, so, of course, it's all employees, but which track are you being hired for? Is it tenure or non-tenure track? A lot of these tracks actually don't matter pretty much at all anymore, but some of them do. And what are the differences between them? Where I trained, the tenure, so it was in the San Francisco Bay Area, I trained at Stanford, and the tenure track, they were only the ones to get housing assistance, which was a big deal in the San Francisco Bay Area, and at UNC, really, there's almost zero difference between the two tracks. What protected, i.e., non-clinical time do you have? If research, that's ideally over 50%. For clinical educators, typically it's 20%, but I've heard of jobs that are 40% too. How long is the time protected before you need funding? Usually like a K or a large society professional development grant. And what are the teaching expectations? What are the teaching opportunities? Are they medical school, residency, fellows, and, of course, what support services exist? Both for the clinical side, all the clinical work you'll be doing, but also for research, so we have a statistician, we have a clinical trials group, people who help with database analytics, and so that's really important if you do want to do investigator-initiated research. And then what's the startup funding? This is kind of like a slush fund that you can use for professional fees, travel, all sorts of things. All right, patients. Where do referrals come from, and how will you be getting referrals? If you're a solo GI practice, you want to have a large referral base and be pointable at not having to be fighting for patients. And also, what's the payer mix? Because that can really affect the dynamics. You may need a spreadsheet for all of this stuff. And all of these questions, all of these things that I'm talking about usually can be negotiated, which sometimes can be negotiated, which is our next talk or one of our next talks, but really the core, most important thing, practically speaking, is the culture of the group and the support of your colleagues. That's one of the most important things. So I think the key partner questions, you want to do this, like, what's the retirement stuff with the HR people or the practice manager? But the key partner questions, I think, are what's the best part of this job? What's the thing you really like the most? And what's the thing that you would change if you could? So that's when they'll talk about the downsides, but you're not phrasing it in that way. All right. We are all really excited for you. All of the faculty here want to meet you and talk with you and answer any questions. So I think we have a couple minutes if there are any questions there about interviewing.

medical job interviews

career strategies

job offer evaluation

interview preparation

medical field careers