March 16, 2019 Saturday
Bedtime Story
Applying for a Residency Program
We will be considering a specific
hypothetical case example of a medical graduate applying to a residency program
with the priority being ophthalmology which you can then generalize to the
larger scale.
Every candidate who is a physician and has
both finished his one-year compulsory internship at a recognized hospital and
has cleared his licensing exams makes an application to residency programs with
his scores and his preferred programs in the rank of order.
It is also accompanied with letters of
recommendations that the candidate is able to garner and list of research
papers published or co-authored by the candidate.
For instance many if not most young medical
graduates who would want to choose ophthalmology as their profession would rank
their choice for residency as something along this order attempting to get the
best residency program of the world if they can:
Number 1: Massachusetts eye and Ear Infirmary/Harvard
Medical School
Number 2: Bascom Palmer Eye
Institute/University of Miami/Jackson Health System
Number 3: Wilmer Eye Institute/Johns
Hopkins University
Number 4: UCLA David Geffen School of
Medicine/UCLE Medical Center
Number 5: University of California San
Francisco
The list can go on to be much longer with
the numbers indicating the order of preference.
This kind of preferential order list that
forms a part of the application by the young medical doctor would not only be
limited to ophthalmology since it is a tough specialty to get into with limited
number of vacancies as compared to say internal medicine or family medicine.
So as a back up the candidate would add in some
other clinical and non-clinical residency programs in other subjects such as
internal medicine, psychiatry and so on as well.
Such an application with similar lists of
residency programs would be made by all the applicants whose numbers could
reach 40,000 each year or even more.
This is a serious challenge and
understandably students raised serious doubts regarding the fairness of such an
algorithm that was based on the Boston Pool Program algorithm.
At the request of the National Student
Internship Committee or the NSIC which petitioned for the modification of
algorithm so as to get a fair representation to the students as much as perceptively
it did for the hospitals.
So how does one ensure fairness in such a
type of matching between two groups who seem to seek a relationship with each
other keeping in mind the priority of each member of both the groups?
Is it even realistic to expect any kind of
fairness through such an algorithm?
Mon Ami being a computer scientist and a
mathematician may be able to recognize the similarity of this problem to some
problem well studied in his areas of interest.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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