Residency Application Question – Chair/PD Letter Requirement

[Viveka Spivey]

Good Afternoon All,

My PD is looking to change the way we do our medical student letters.  We have a lot of students who apply to orthopaedics and writing letters for them can be onerous.  Also, trying get them to rotate with the Chair or PD is difficult given the limited amount of time and space.

Do many program still require a Chair and/or a PD letter?

Please let me know when you can.

Thank you and have a great day!

Sincerely,

Viveka Spivey, MS, C-TAGME (She/Her)

Director of Education

University of Miami Miller School of medicine

Department of Orthopaedics

 

[Melissa Wheeler]

Hi Viveka,

We do not require a chair letter and in case other programs do, we often just say our PD letter is a joint letter with the Chair to cover those students that may need it.

Have you considered using the AOA recommended Electronic Standardized Letter of Recommendation? That might make it easier for the letter writers.

Electronic Standardized Letter of Recommendation (eSLOR)

Thanks,
Melissa

[Melissa Wheeler]

Hi Viveka,

We do not require a chair letter and in case other programs do, we often just say our PD letter is a joint letter with the Chair to cover those students that may need it.

Have you considered using the AOA recommended Electronic Standardized Letter of Recommendation? That might make it easier for the letter writers.

Electronic Standardized Letter of Recommendation (eSLOR)

Thanks,
Melissa

[Viveka Spivey]

Hi Melissa, Thank you for your quick response.  We do both the SLOR and a narrative letter.  Even if we just did the SLOR we still feel it necessary to write a good amount in the comments.

-Viveka-

[Laurie Lynch]

Hi Viveka,

We don’t require a chair or PD letter. We look for letters where writers indicate a good amount of time has been spent with the student.

We also have challenges trying to get enough time with our chair and/or PD for students and sometimes schedules just don’t allow enough exposure to enable writing a letter.

Our department strongly encourages our faculty to use the eSLOR when writing letters and include robust comments. One or two still do the narrative, and sometimes the student requests both specifically.

Laurie

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