Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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A good chief resident is under pressure from residents and the department director and must work for the welfare of both the housestaff and the institution. Using precepts from Niccoló Machiavelli's The Prince, the author gives advice for chief residents on how to balance their responsibilities. The author, using Machiavelli's precepts, discusses the difficulties of introducing change, supervising former colleagues and peers, the opprobrium that inevitably attaches to tough decisions, the need to set good examples, and other aspects of being a chief resident.
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Although medicine has been traditionally a man's profession, a full third of medical students are now women, and in some schools nearly a half. Only a few articles exist exploring gender differences in the interview process. Implications of sexual discrimination have been made regarding the weight of the interview, the descriptors applied to the women interviewees, and the tones of their letters of reference. ⋯ The current study was designed to explore any relationships between the questions asked in the interview and the gender of the applicant. The women were more frequently asked about their plans for marriage and children, while the men were more often questioned about their reasons for entering medicine or selection of a specialty. The interviewees believed they could give more honest responses to interviewers of the same gender.
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The National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) was established in the early 1950s to bring order and fairness to a previously chaotic application process for internship and residency positions. Over the years many reservations were raised about the fairness of the process, specifically, that hospital programs are doing better than students are (i.e., programs obtain preferred residents more often than students receive preferred programs). This paper presents an analysis of the results of the 1986 Match. ⋯ In fact, in 20 of 22 specialty programs, the students' degree of success was greater than or equal to the success of the programs. This finding raises the question of fairness toward programs rather than students. The authors analyze factors that affected both the hospitals' and the students' degrees of success in the 1986 Match and suggest strategies for improving the Match results.
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Comparative Study
The controllable lifestyle factor and students' attitudes about specialty selection.
Questionnaires were distributed to 346 fourth-year students in nine medical schools. The students were asked to state their selected specialty and to rank the importance that each of 25 influences, listed as questionnaire items, had had in making their choice of specialty. Factor analysis showed that particular items were significantly associated with particular factors. ⋯ Responses to items that defined the cerebral and practice factor were highest from the group of students choosing CL specialties and lowest from the group choosing NCL specialties. The NCL students scored highest in the altruism factor and the CL students scored the lowest. The surgery and NCL groups were similar in attitude patterns, and both were substantially different in attitude patterns from those of the CL groups.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)