Understand your resident contract: What you don’t know may hurt you
When I matched into anesthesiology residency in 2002, I assumed that the entire four years of training were guaranteed to me, barring any gross failure on my part. A package deal, essentially. I hadn’t heard of anyone not finishing.
For me, residency was exhaustingly tolerable, yet gratefully formative – interspersed with warm camraderie, the occasional difficult patient or frustrating attending, satisfying progress, and finite episodes of survivable misery. I had a …