Examining the Factors Influencing Applicants’ Placement on One General Surgery Program’s Rank Order List

Purpose Surgery residency applications include variables that determine an individual’s rank on a program’s match list. We performed this study to determine which residency application variables are the most impactful in creating our program’s rank order list. Methods We completed a retrospective examination of all interviewed applicants for the 2019 match. We recorded United States Medical Licensing Examinations (USMLE) step I and II scores, class quartile rank from the Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE), Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) membership, geographic region, surgery clerkship grade, and grades on other clerkships. The MSPE and letters of recommendation were reviewed by two of the authors and assigned a score of 1 to 3, where 1 was weak and 3 was strong. The same two authors reviewed the assessments from each applicant’s interview and assigned a score from 1-5, where 1 was poor and 5 was excellent. Univariate analysis was performed, and the significant variables were used to construct an adjusted multivariate model with significance measured at P < .05. Results Univariate analysis for all 92 interviewed applicants demonstrated that USMLE step 2 scores ( P = .002), class quartile rank ( P = .004), AOA status ( P = .014), geographic location ( P < .001), letters of recommendation ( P < .001), and interview rating ( P < .001) were significant in predicting an applicant’s position on the rank list. On multivariate analysis only USMLE step 2 ( P = .018) and interview ( P < .001) remained significant. Conclusion USMLE step 2 and an excellent interview were the most important factors in constructing our rank order list. Applicants with a demonstrated strong clinical fund of knowledge that develop a rapport with our faculty and residents receive the highest level of consideration for our program.

Software Fault Localization through Aggregation-Based Neural Ranking for Static and Dynamic Features Selection

The automatic localization of software faults plays a critical role in assisting software professionals in fixing problems quickly. Despite various existing models for fault tolerance based on static features, localization is still challenging. By considering the dynamic features, the capabilities of the fault recognition models will be significantly enhanced. The current study proposes a model that effectively ranks static and dynamic parameters through Aggregation-Based Neural Ranking (ABNR). The proposed model includes rank lists produced by self-attention layers using rank aggregation mechanisms to merge them into one aggregated rank list. The rank list would yield the suspicious code statements in descending order of the rank. The performance of ABNR is evaluated against the open-source dataset for fault prediction. ABNR model has exhibited noticeable performance in fault localization. The proposed model is evaluated with other existing models like Ochiai, Fault localization technique based on complex network theory, Tarantula, Jaccard, and software-network centrality measure concerning metrics like assertions evaluated, Wilcoxon signed-rank test, and Top-N.

The Digital Dilemma: Perspectives From Otolaryngology Residency Applicants on Social Media

Objective: To evaluate the impact of otolaryngology programs’ social media on residency candidates in the 2020 to 2021 application cycle. Methods: An anonymous survey was distributed via Otomatch, Headmirror, and word of mouth to otolaryngology residency applicants in the 2021 Match. Survey items included demographics, social media usage, and impact of programs’ social media on applicant perception and ranking. Descriptive statistics were performed, and responses based on demographic variables were compared using Fisher’s exact and Mann-Whitney U tests. Results: Of 64 included respondents, nearly all (61/64, 95%) used Facebook, Instagram, and/or Twitter for personal and/or professional purposes. Applicants (59/64, 92%) most commonly researched otolaryngology residency programs on Instagram (55/59, 93%) and Twitter (36/59, 61%), with younger ( P = .023) and female ( P = .043) applicants being more likely to engage with programs on Instagram. Program accounts were most helpful in showcasing program culture (50/59, 85%) and highlighting its location (34/59, 58%). Nearly one third (19/59, 32%) reported that social media impacted their rank list. Age, gender, reapplication, home program status, or time taken off before and/or during medical school did not significantly influence social media’s usefulness in the application cycle. Conclusion: Social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter are frequently used by applicants to assess otolaryngology residency programs. Programs’ social media accounts effectively demonstrate program culture and affect applicants’ rank lists. As social media usage continues to rise in the medical community, these findings can help otolaryngology residency programs craft a beneficial online presence that aids in recruitment, networking, and education.

Impacts of the Virtual Landscape During the COVID-19 Pandemic on the 2020 Application Cycle

Introduction/Objective In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 application cycle adapted to a mostly virtual setting. This project focused on the impact of these changes on the 2020 application cycle with the elimination of in- person away rotations and interviews, as well as the implementation of new virtual opportunities for learning and interacting with residents and programs. Methods/Case Report This study was conducted through an anonymous survey sent out to programs that engaged in social media usage in the 2020 application cycle. The survey was made available to program directors, faculty, residents and the matched applicants and focused on their usage and opinion of impact of virtual opportunities, virtual interviews and social media encounters. Results (if a Case Study enter NA) A total of 17 program directors/faculty, 17 residents and 19 matched applicants completed the survey across 91 programs surveyed. Virtual opportunities that were offered across these programs include: open houses, sub-internships, didactic lectures, grand rounds, Q&A sessions, and virtual facility tours. Responses showed that 4 programs (16%) moved applicants up on their rank list based on pre-interview virtual interactions. From the applicant perspective, 13 (76.5%) said virtual opportunities impacted the way they evaluated programs with 13 (68.4%) ranking programs higher and 3 (15.7%) ranking programs they otherwise would not have ranked. On the other hand, 21 faculty/residents (80.7%) felt that applicants missed out on fully experiencing the program due to lack of in person interviews and away rotations. However, 14 programs (56%) interviewed more candidates and offered more interview days during the 2020 application cycle. Applicants also applied to a greater number of programs with 42% of surveyed applicants applying to more than 50 programs, however none attended more than 30 interviews. Conclusion In conclusion, adaptations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have provided an unexpected opportunity to explore the impact of the virtual landscape on residency recruitment.

Factors used in Applicant Ranking of Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Fellowships and the Availability of Online Information

Background: The Internet is often the first resource used by applicants to evaluate fellowship programs. However, information on these websites can be often incomplete, inaccessible, and/or inaccurate. The primary objective of this study was to examine key factors that orthopedic foot and ankle fellowship applicants use to rank programs. The secondary objective was to assess both the accessibility and availability of the information on orthopedic foot and ankle fellowship program websites. Methods: A Qualtrics survey was distributed via e-mail to those who matched into an orthopedic foot and ankle fellowship position from years 2008-2020. A comprehensive list of orthopedic foot and ankle fellowship programs was created. Program websites were evaluated for accessibility as well as the quality of recruitment and educational content. Results: There were a total of 114 survey responses out of 644 invites (17.7%). The most important factors for establishing a rank list were operative experience, current faculty, and program reputation. Eighty-five percent (41/48) of orthopedic foot and ankle fellowship websites were directly accessible using Google. On average, accessible orthopedic foot and ankle fellowship websites contained only 57% (11.5/20) of the content deemed desirable. Conclusion: Orthopedic foot and ankle websites are widely accessible and have higher recruitment and educational quality content scores compared with previously published data. The most important factors for establishing a rank list are consistent with previous literature. Those who ranked operative experience as one of the most important factors when establishing a rank list did not complete more operative cases than those who did not. Level of Evidence: Level IV.

Gender Evaluation and Numeric Distribution in Emergency Medicine Residencies (GENDER): A follow-up survey of current EM residents (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Females comprise over half of medical school matriculants but only one-third of emergency medicine (EM) residents. Various factors may contribute to why fewer females choose the field of emergency medicine, such as existing presence of females in the specialty. OBJECTIVE This study is a follow-up to previous work, and a survey was used to assess current residents’ attitudes and perceptions on various factors including those relating to gender on creating rank lists as medical students and in perceived effects on residency education. METHODS An online survey consisting of Likert scale questions of a variety of factors influencing a student’s decision to create a rank list and in perceived effects on residency education was sent to current EM residents in 2020. RESULTS Residents from 17 programs participated in the survey with an 18% response rate. The most important factors in creating a rank list were the personality of residents in the program, location, and facility type. For factors specifically related to gender, respondents who answered affirmatively to whether gender composition of residents affected selection of a program in making a rank list were more likely to also answer affirmatively to subsequent questions related to gender of program leadership (p<0.001) and gender composition of attending physicians (p<0.001). Personality of residents was also the most important factor perceived to affect residency education. For factors influencing rank list and residency education, female respondents placed higher importance on subcategories related to gender (i.e., gender composition of residents, of program leadership, and of attending physicians) to a significant degree compared to their male counterparts. CONCLUSIONS While factors such as location and resident personality show the most importance in influencing residency selection, when stratifying based on respondent gender, females tend to indicate factors relating to gender have more influence on rank list and residency education compared to males. CLINICALTRIAL N/A

Dual Branch Attention Network for Person Re-Identification

As a sub-direction of image retrieval, person re-identification (Re-ID) is usually used to solve the security problem of cross camera tracking and monitoring. A growing number of shopping centers have recently attempted to apply Re-ID technology. One of the development trends of related algorithms is using an attention mechanism to capture global and local features. We notice that these algorithms have apparent limitations. They only focus on the most salient features without considering certain detailed features. People’s clothes, bags and even shoes are of great help to distinguish pedestrians. We notice that global features usually cover these important local features. Therefore, we propose a dual branch network based on a multi-scale attention mechanism. This network can capture apparent global features and inconspicuous local features of pedestrian images. Specifically, we design a dual branch attention network (DBA-Net) for better performance. These two branches can optimize the extracted features of different depths at the same time. We also design an effective block (called channel, position and spatial-wise attention (CPSA)), which can capture key fine-grained information, such as bags and shoes. Furthermore, based on ID loss, we use complementary triplet loss and adaptive weighted rank list loss (WRLL) on each branch during the training process. DBA-Net can not only learn semantic context information of the channel, position, and spatial dimensions but can integrate detailed semantic information by learning the dependency relationships between features. Extensive experiments on three widely used open-source datasets proved that DBA-Net clearly yielded overall state-of-the-art performance. Particularly on the CUHK03 dataset, the mean average precision (mAP) of DBA-Net achieved 83.2%.

The Importance of Female Mentors and Safety in the Workplace to Female Otolaryngology Applicants When Creating Rank Lists

Objectives: The aim of this research is to understand the importance of female career mentors, research mentors, co-residents, and program directors/chairs to current female otolaryngology residents when applying to residency. The importance of safety in the workplace was also investigated. Methods: Surveys were sent via electronic mail to 119 programs, and program directors were asked to distribute them to female residents. Using the Likert scale, participants ranked the importance of various factors when creating a rank list, in particular, importance of safety in the workplace and importance of female mentors in various leadership positions. Demographic information, geographic location, LGBTQ identification, and fellowship plans were also collected. Results: There were 62 participants nationally. Eighty-seven percent (n = 54) of participants stated that having at least 1 female attending and having female co-residents was “very important” or “important” when ranking programs. A number of respondents replied that having a female career development mentor (38.7% [n = 24] and 43.5% [n = 27]), female program director or chair (4.8% [n = 3] and 16.1% [n = 10]), and female research mentor (12.9% [n = 8] and 29% [n = 18]) was “very important” or “important,” respectively. Ninety-three percent (n = 58) replied that feeling safe in their training environment was “very important” or “important.” Conclusion: Having female mentors as well as safety in the workplace in residency is important to a vast majority of residents and applicants when creating a rank list. Programs with women in these roles may gain a disproportionate number of female residents because they may be more desirable places than those without women in these roles.