Last Friday, March 15th was ASHP Match Day. For those of you not familiar with Match Day, it’s the day when P4 students find out if they’ve been matched with a residency and if so, where they’ll be spending the next and arguably most important year of their careers. Needless to say, the day is quite exciting and emotions run very high throughout the process.
While I have not gone through the Match process, as I am only a P2 student currently, I thought this would be an opportune time to talk about how Ohio State prepares you for a residency so that our students have the best chance of getting placed at their preferred sites.
Residency application is a very competitive process, with only 64% of applicants nation-wide getting placed into a program this year. At Ohio State, we are working on skills from day 1 that will prepare you to be a competitive candidate for residencies. During the transitions course at the beginning of your P1 year, you start building important professional skills such as how to properly create a CV, how to handle professional correspondences, and how to prepare for interviews. These skills are incredibly useful in any hiring process, but especially so in the residency process. Our Career Services staff work extensively with us throughout the entire PharmD program to hone these skills and make sure that when we get to that residency interview, we are ready to blow them away. I can personally say that when I started pharmacy school, I had an outdated and frankly awful resume. But working with Natalie Fox (one of our amazing Career Services specialists), I was able to not only get it ready for applying to internships during school, but set it up to build on during the rest of my time in school. Career Services also sends out a weekly email with internships hiring in the area. Since experience outside of the classroom is one of the best ways to set you apart, this is a great resource as well!
Beyond this, our experiential education staff works tirelessly to match us with great rotations during all four years of pharmacy school. These rotations not only help give you the skills to be ready for a residency, but they help you decide if a residency is even for you.
My closing comment is that while there is a ton of hype around residency, and our program does a phenomenal job preparing you for it, residency is not for everyone and while growing, is still done by a minority of students. And a lot of our great programs that help prepare out students for residency prepare our students to be great job candidates as well. So whichever path you decide to go down, rest assured Ohio State will prepare you for it.