In-Person Residency Interviews Deemed a Success

“If we can continue to demonstrate the volume of what we’re doing, case numbers and complexities of cases we have, we will be putting our name on the map more boldly,” said Nadia Mohyuddin, MD, FACS, Director of the Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery Residency Program. “We continue to recruit excellent candidates with a strong interest for a new program. They get the depth and breadth of everything Houston Methodist has to offer.” The department’s first two residents were added in 2022 with two added in 2023. Two will be added each year through 2026, giving Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery a total of 10 residents for the full complement that has been approved thus far. With the addition of this year’s two new residents, the current program will have six learners for the five-year training program. “Any program wants to be sure they have the capacity without thinning out the experience,” Mohyuddin said, adding the program must show innovation, up-to-date technology, quality of type of patients as well as complexity of patients to challenge the learners. Mohyuddin said the program already has attracted grand rounds speakers who have national reputations. “We want to attract competitive applicants, medical students and researchers to join our department because we want to expand our clinical enterprise at all of the affiliated and sister hospitals of Houston Methodist from an academic and research arm,” Mohyuddin said. Yin Yiu, MD, Residency Associate Program Director, said she was glad to see the program switch to in-person interviews because of the stronger benefits of meeting the residents and seeing how they interact with people and each other. Because this is a new residency program, this is the first year the interviews were held in person. Some programs throughout the country continue to have a hybrid form of interviews where some are in person and others are via Zoom. “It’s much more of a fluid process to be able to assess candidates outside of Zoom interviews,” Yiu said, pointing out the Zoom interviews held during COVID-19 and quarantine were one on one with one candidate having a Zoom meeting with one faculty representative. The current interview protocol gives candidates a chance to meet with more faculty, with other residents and candidates. “Overall, in-person interviews allow both the applicants and our faculty to get a more cohesive assessment of one another,” Yiu said. “I often tell students to ‘go off their gut feeling’ for their choice of residency, and I think they are more capable of doing this by coming to meet us and see our facilities in person.”