The Cost of Applying for Residency

Happy Monday, and welcome to Medical Mondays! Since I covered how much the cost of a year of medical school was a couple weeks ago, I figured I’d follow up with what I’m currently also working on–applying for residency programs! If you’ve ever wondered how much that costs…keep on reading!

A couple years ago (it feels like eons more), I applied to only osteopathic medical schools because I was about 99.9% certain that I wanted to go into primary care, with an emphasis in working with the under-served, and most DO programs seemed to embrace that mentality/thought process.

For those of you wondering why I gave up my apartment this year and am moving all over the country (~10 states in 10 months, here we go!)…

The main reason was so that I could do rotations at programs I was interested in.

It was also to save money. (Why pay for an apartment I’m not going to be living in?)

I was lucky enough that I managed to graduate from college with no debt in my name (with many thanks to my parents, scholarships + grants, and working 3 part-time jobs whilst double-majoring–behold, my college life), but…medical school is not cheap, especially when you’re an out-of-state student and ineligible for most of the scholarships offered (but yay for winning one for being a nice person!).

I think my experiences working with/living in towns and cities with populations of 3,000 – 450,000+ have made me wildly adaptable to a variety of different circumstances.

But that also makes it infinitely more difficult to narrow down programs that I like!

(I didn’t take the USMLE since most FM programs don’t care which exam you take, and I wasn’t interested in any of the programs that required it.)

For instance, applying to 10 AOA FM and 10 ACGME FM programs would be… $97 + $97. This, of course, does not include travel expenses (plane tickets, gas prices, etc.).

I thinned down my list by a ton, and just applied to most of the MD programs I’m interested in last week (there are a couple more that I’m debating on!), so right now, the concern is more about how much traveling to and from each interview is going to cost.

I’m trying to schedule all my east coast-ish interviews while I’m still out here, and all the west coast ones for when I’m back in the general vicinity of CA, because I’d really like to not have to fly across the country several times every couple o’ days. :o Ain’t nobody got time/money for that.

So far (knocking on wood), it’s been working out pretty well! I have several scheduled during my audition rotations, and 4 scheduled during the week that I’m going to be taking “vacation” (so that I can go on said interviews). Game on!