Welcome to UVA!
We are excited that you are interested in our residency program. We are a large volume, high acuity, and resident run emergency department. We train physicians that are able to succeed in any environment after graduation. In addition to developing your clinical expertise, we will foster your development in other work related areas, which have helped our graduates receive highly sought after jobs and leadership positions early in their careers. We also want our residents to maintain or develop new interests outside of medicine that keep them happy and healthy!
We are a very transparent program and are happy to answer any questions you have about our program and community. For the application process, we will begin reviewing applications in late September. With rare exceptions, we will only consider applicants with at least one standardized letter of evaluation (SLOE). We are interested in you as an entire person and do not screen applications based on board scores, grades, medical school, prior training, location, gender, race, or ethnicity. We are happy to match applicants with COMLEX scores or international medical graduates needing visas. We aim for our residents to have diverse backgrounds that allow them to learn from each other and care for our remarkably varied patient population.
We will begin releasing rolling interview invitations on the unified interview release date in October and continue to extend invites weekly until December 15th. The timing of your interview invitation does not reflect our level of interest in you. We will send invites via email after 6pm EST, and we will not send more invites than available interview slots. You will have 72 hours to respond to interview invitations.
We will have both in-person and virtual interviews. We will offer virtual interviews on Tuesday mornings. We will have a few virtual Tuesday afternoon sessions for applicants to accommodate people living in other time zones. We also will host in-person interviews on Wednesday mornings. For in-person dates, there will be a social event with residents on Tuesday evening, and you will get a tour of the hospital and opportunity to attend residency didactics. While we suspect that you will glean a better understanding of our program in-person, we understand there are many constraints that may limit your ability to come to UVA for an interview. Your decision to interview in-person or virtually will not impact your placement on the rank list. Similarly, the date of your interview will not impact your position on the rank list.
Interviews are informal. We want you to be comfortable, and you do NOT need to wear a suit. We will be walking a fair amount so please consider wearing comfortable shoes. Your interviewers will likely be wearing casual attire and will not be wearing suits. Most of your interviewers will have read your application. We intentionally have 1-2 interviewers not review your application in order to make sure you get an unbiased interview. Most interviews will entail a few questions and then an opportunity for you to learn more about our program. We want to know about who you are as a person, and we have no intention of asking you any medical questions or asking you to open a sealed window. You will have a brief introduction to the program by the program director or associate program director. You will then have about 4 15-20 minute interviews. We will also tour the ED followed by lunch for in-person interviews.
We will host two second look events on February 5 and 12 after we have completed our rank list. Details will be forthcoming. They will likely entail a social event with the residents the night before, didactic conference, tour, and lunch with residents and faculty. These events are entirely optional and will not impact your place on our rank list (unless an applicant demonstrates egregious unprofessionalism, which has never happened). We have matched applicants from these events and applicants that have not attended these events. We will send out invites to these events by December 15 with RSVPs due by January 11.
Please note that we will not send post-interview gifts. This does not mean that we do not want you to come to UVA. Based on feedback from our residents, we have decided to prioritize spending on activities for our current residents and the ED.
You are also welcome to visit our ED to shadow on most Wednesdays from December to February. Residency leadership would like to meet you, but they will likely be interviewing candidates during this time and not available. Please email Kyle Williams (kew6k@uvahealth.org) in advance to schedule this opportunity.
We’re excited to meet you!
— Joshua Easter on behalf of the entire Residency Program Leadership Team