Session 102 Dr. Ryan Matika Residency Program Director in Anesthesiology talks about what he's looking for in his applicants. He also shares what his residents look for when students are doing rotations. Specialty Stories is part of the Meded Media. If you haven’t yet, please check out all the other resources we provide to help premeds, medical students, and residents on their medical journey! [01:07] Interest in Anesthesiology Ryan got interested in anesthesiology when he was in his second year in medical school. They had a program where they were assigned a mentor who happened to be an anesthesiologist.  He went into medical school not thinking about anesthesiology. In fact, he was leaning into internal medicine. But from his rotations, he eventually got drawn towards anesthesiology. He thought about this halfway through his third year because of his mentor. Ryan thinks there is a major element in picking your specialty based on the personality and that element of finding your people. There's a certain type of personality that's a better fit for a specialty than others. But that said, he doesn't think any specialty has one personality. [03:10] Traits that Lead to Being a Good Anesthesiologist The longer he has done this, the more he thinks that there are more traits to being a good doctor. Those traits pretty much transcend the type of residency. He thinks all residents of different specialties have a lot of things in common. First is what drives you, what keeps you up in the morning. That type of work ethic and that type of positive drive would make good residents. For anesthesiology in general, they're meticulous. Although being OCD is not necessary, but you might notice a lot of OCD behaviors evident in anesthesiologists. [05:10] What an Anesthesiologist Does They say that the only thing an anesthesiologist does is putting patients to sleep and waking them up after surgery is one of the misconceptions. There are times your services are requested by a surgeon and part of that is keeping patients calm. But one of the most important things is delivering the anesthetic methods essentially rendering someone in a medically induced coma to tolerate surgery. Also during that time, you're managing the patient's physiology, most importantly the cardio and pulmonary physiology. They could give medications to make patients very hypotensive. The patients can be put through all kinds of cardiovascular difficulties and you have to manage them through. The anesthetics would give necessary poisons and the management they do is to offset those poisons in a healthy patient. And this could get even more tricky for patients with chronic, significant or uncompensated diseases. A lot of the time is focused on physiology and the vitals. While a little bit less time is spent on ensuring that patients are in a medically induced coma as they have to ensure patients are asleep throughout the surgery. [07:40] The Residency Training Path There are two types of programs – the categorical and the advanced programs. Almost everything was advanced in the good old days. Then categorical has gotten more popular. the difference is how you treat that first or intern year. About 75% of the spots are categorical. When you match with an anesthesiology program, you're doing a four-year program. But the first year is essentially mostly off-service rotations. Its purpose is to meet the qualifications of your intern year which is either a medicine year or a surgery year. The advanced year is where you match those two years into separate ones. So you have the intern year where you match into a medicine transitional or surgical year. Then you start your formal anesthesiology three-year training afterward. During those three years, you do the same cases over and over again. You do more simplicity, a lot of airway work. You're getting the basic skills you need for anesthesiology. During the latter half of your residency, you're doing subspecialties. You deal with much s