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As a first-year medical student with an interest in psychiatry, I read the Psychiatric News articles on the difficulty of recruiting medical students to the field. Perhaps my experience is symptomatic of the problem.
I attended a residency fair on April 11 at one of the major medical schools in Southern California. I drove over 70 miles to attend and was chagrined to discover not a single psychiatry residency representative was present, not even one from the sponsoring institution. The only represented program with any psychiatric emphasis outside the military was the combined family practice-psychiatry program at the University of California at Davis. I was unable to plan better for an extern elective, and my classmates were unable to be persuaded to try an extra psychiatry rotation.
There were four anesthesiology programs represented; it is a discipline that is also experiencing difficulty with recruitment. They understand that one makes converts by communicating with prospects. I hope that my experience was an aberration; if not, the situation needs to be rectified.
Lee Hamilton
Medical Student