Behind the Night, the surgery podcast, relevant and engaging content designed to help you dominate the day.

Hello, and welcome to this Behind the Night episode in Surge of Education, where the general surgery education team from Cleveland Clinic.

I'm Nicole Brooks, a general surgery resident and current surgery classification research fellow on Judith French from the PhD Education Scientist for the Department of General Surgery.

I'm Jeremy Lutman, I'm the Director of Graduate Education here in former program director.

On today's episode, we'll be discussing application to surgery residency in the match.

It's hard to believe, but the newest trainees are joining our programs in less than a month, and at the same time senior medical students are beginning their application process.

The last few years have seen some major changes in the application and herment process that continue to evolve.

So today, we're going to dive into some of those details, as well as learn more about why they're happening.

We're joined by Dr. Jennifer Lafamina. Dr. Lafamina is an associate professor at UMass Chan Medical School, and surgical oncologist at UMass Memorial Medical Center, where she also serves as the program director for the general surgery residency program.

She completed med school at UCLA, residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, and fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Dr. Lafamina is a true leader in surgical education. She serves on the board of directors of the associate student of program directors in surgery, and was the APDS representative to E-RAS and ACME.

She's the chair of the general surgery application and interview task force, and has been instrumental in our understanding of the use of this supplemental application for medical students applying to general surgery.

She'll also be joining the board of directors at the NRMP starting in July. We're thrilled to welcome you to the show.

All right, so let's start from the very beginning. Why was the supplemental application even created?

Thank you, Dr. French. And first of all, thank you for welcoming me today, and as we get started, I have been incredibly fortunate to work for the APDS and the WAMC.

And soon the NRMP, as I transitioned those earlier roles, but today I'm really speaking to you on behalf of my own personal opinions and not those of those organizations.

But you know, the E-RAS supplemental and even beyond the E-RAS supplemental application, the recommendations that forth by general surgery were in response to the increasing challenges faced across the continuum of residency recruitment.

And many times when we think of recruitment, we always use the word the match, which somehow gets associated with the NRMP.

But really, recruitment is this continuum of submission, application review in the invitation, the interviews themselves, and the rank list.

And what's important to know is that each one of these steps involve a different group of people, the application submission and the management of interviews.

Well, that's in WAMC's E-RAS pocket, the interviews that's within the program, and that's really the match of the candidate in the program that is under the match programs, including the NRMP.

And what we know is that you look across the entire continuum, one of the major challenges that we're facing are the increasing and ballooning application numbers relative to position.

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