Second Year Residency Tips

Second Year Residency Tips

Your second year of internal medicine residency is a pivotal one because you will have more clinical autonomy and added team leadership and teaching responsibilities. This year can be very rewarding and one of tremendous personal growth.

• Become a positive role model for every member of your team.

• Make time to build and reflect on your leadership skills.

• Make time to build and reflect on your teaching skills.

• Continue to invest in sleep and wellness.

• Actively solicit constructive feedback from all members of the team.

• Review the IM milestones before the residency year starts and periodically throughout the year to monitor your progress and pick areas to work on- use them to set learning goals for the year.

• Set clear expectations for all members of the team and follow through on them.

• Give the students on your team meaningful roles.

• Provide confidential constructive feedback to team members.

• Don't be afraid to ask for help or admit that you don't know something.

• Actively engage consultants by asking well-crafted clinical questions.

• Carve out time to build your knowledge and comfort in ambulatory medicine, invest in your panel of patients and build relationships with them.

• Critically review your clinical decisions and actively learn from your mistakes.

• Make time to read around your patients and elective topics.

• Seek out one or two clinical and research mentors.

• Explore career opportunities.

• Start your required scholarly project and quality improvement work- select a faculty supervisor who also might be able to serve as a job reference and/or write a fellowship letter of recommendation.