Applicant Perception and Content Exploration of the 2024 podiatric Residency Interview Process

Considerable resources are dedicated on an annual basis to the podiatric medicine and surgery residency interview by both students and programs. Despite this, relatively little is known about student perception of the process, nor the format and content of interview. The objective of this investigation was to study and organize experiences of fourth-year podiatric medical students following the 2024 Centralized Residency Interview Program (CRIP) process. An anonymous and voluntary survey was developed and made available to fourth year podiatric medical students. It was relatively common for there to be academic, social/personal, case work-up, and rapid-fire academic question components to the interview. It was also very common to be provided with the opportunity to ask programs questions. It was relatively uncommon for there to be ethical/moral questions, personality/psychologic assessments, logic assessments, and hands-on demonstrations. The most common hands-on demonstrations were suturing, hand ties and performance of fixation principles. Relatively high yield academic topics included plain film radiography interpretation, rearfoot/ankle osseous trauma, diabetic foot infection, advanced imaging interpretation, and fixation constructs/principles. When evaluating programs, students placed high value on surgical volume, surgical variety, relative resident autonomy, program location, exposure to outpatient clinics, salary, future connections as a program alumnus, unique off-service rotations, exposure to business management/coding/billing, scope of practice, exposure to inpatient management, resident salary, and who the senior co-residents would be. The results of this investigation provide unique information for both medical students and residency programs with respect to the perception, format and content of the podiatric residency interview process.