Fellowship Interviews Move Online as Novel Coronavirus Halts Travel

On March 16^th, as Bay Area officials announced the shelter-in-place order, Kate McGurk was scrambling to re-structure the Division of Vascular Surgery’s Fellowship Interview Day …only 48 hours in the future.

“We usually start our visits with a pre-interview dinner the night before,” explain McGurk. “Then, on the interview day, the trainees come to the vascular surgery academic office, meet for group presentations, rotate through 7-9 interview rooms as well as a casual resident room, and conclude with a tour.”

Everything had to change. McGurk said she couldn’t figure out how to replicate the dinner but was able to move presentations from the program director and division chief online and substituted the tour with video footage of the new hospital and medical campus.

“Part of what made it work was our faculty's willingness to participate and learn the Zoom system,” said McGurk. “In the two days leading up to the interviews, I tested or spoke with each of the faculty to make sure they were all on the same page.”

Dr. Marc Melcher, who heads the Abdominal Transplantation Fellowship Program, says he has been taking notes.

“We will try to learn from what vascular and breast surgery did; everyone has been collaborative and sharing,” said Melcher.

Melcher equated moving the interview season online to stages of grief: denial, anger, and finally acceptance.

“Early on some programs were refusing to do video interviews,” said Melcher. “In retrospect it seems obvious, but the environment changed so fast.”

For Dr. Graeme Rosenberg, a general surgery PGY4, virtual interviews actually meant more one-on-one time with faculty but missing out on witnessing team interactions.

“Overall I think the experience was excellent. The one thing that was missing is that you don’t get a ‘feel’ for the culture and relationships between fellow and attending. This is a loss and you miss a major component of what I use to judge a program. You have to feel like you can be at home there, and, without meeting people, seeing how they interact, and getting a feel for the room, it's lost,” said Rosenberg.

Despite the drawbacks, Melcher, who has been a critic of the expense associated with the process for applicants, says he’s looking at this experience as data for proposing a kind of pre-interview match.

“Dr. [Irene] Wapnir and I are talking about surveying everyone to get feedback,” said Melcher. “We can learn things from these challenging times to apply in the future.”