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GME Best Practices: Personalized recruitment documents and cost comparative handouts

Many residency and fellowship programs report struggling with how to connect individual candidates to central Pennsylvania. The Internal Medicine Residency at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center may have found a solution.

For the 2019-20 recruitment season, the program added fact sheets to its folders that are handed out the morning of the interview. The applicants don’t get every fact sheet, though; they get just one sheet based on the interests they listed on their ERAS application. For example, if outdoor activities is chosen as one of their interests, the fact sheet includes hiking, fishing and walking/biking trails. The fact sheet shares information about places to enjoy those activities in Hershey and the surrounding areas.

The Internal Medicine Residency also included a Resident Stipend Cost Comparative handout for all candidates. Penn State is compared to Temple University, Rutgers, the University of Rochester and the University of Maryland. The comparative looks at salary, salary equivalents and cost of rent in Hershey and at these other four institutions.

Internal users can view a selection of the fact sheets and the cost comparative in the GME Best Practices folder on the network drive. For access to additional fact sheets or with questions, email Nora McGovern, GME Coordinator for Internal Medicine, at nmcgovern1@pennstatehealth.psu.edu.

The GME office is continuing to collect recruitment best practices. Programs that have any to share should email Lauren Talhelm at ltalhelm@pennstatehealth.psu.edu.

If you're having trouble accessing this content, or would like it in another format, please email the Penn State College of Medicine web department.