Hiiii you guys! So you've decided (perhaps via the flow chart in the last post) that you want to do an internship. Hooray!
First, an aside: Large animal (particularly equine) folks, your internships are by and large not organized through the match (some academic ones are). Search the AAEP website, consult with your peers, and do externships AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE in your clinical year. Some crazy folks even do externships before clinical year. You generally have to do an externship (think two weeks at least) at a hospital to be considered for an internship. That is the sum total of what I remember about getting an equine internship before I switched teams, so aaaanyways, the following guide is mostly for small animal internships.
Okay, so almost all small animal internships are applied for and obtained through the AAVC's Veterinary Internship and Residency Matching Program, aka the match. Residencies also (except anatomic pathology, since those folks are on their own drumbeat).
The match is a computer database and...algorithm that tries to match hundreds of internship programs with the candidates that best suit them (and vice versa). Here is a quick and dirty rundown of how it works:
1. In approximately October, you sign up for the match. You choose an initial "tier" to buy, or number of programs you can apply to. At the time of this writing, applying to 10 or fewer programs costs $85, applying to 11-20 programs costs $250, and applying to >21 programs costs $350. You can upgrade at any time, but you cannot downgrade.
2. You have to fill in some information (where you went to school, GPA, class rank, upload resume, upload application essay...) to complete your application package. This is due by approximately December.
3. You also have to get 3-4 (hopefully) smart, influential veterinarians to write you recommendations, all of which are also due by approximately December.
4. You then apply to a number of internship programs (see tier, above), and rank them according to your preference. This rank order list gets finalized at some point and you get an official-looking e-mail to confirm your decision.
5.You panic for two months, during which time the institutions are arranging and finalizing their ranked lists of candidates.
6. In mid-February, Match Day happens. This is when the match algorithm pairs each candidate with their best-suited internship program, as determined by "highest mutual level of preference". There is an explanation on the VIRMP website that is pretty good, but essentially, the institutions make offers (in the running of the algorithm) to their most preferred candidates, and the algorithm moves down the ranked lists until all positions have been filled or all candidates have been "offered" a job.
The intention is that you will match with your highest-ranked program that has a position to offer you, as determined by the programs' ranking of you as a candidate. You will never match with a program that you did not rank, and you will never match with a program that did not rank you.
Here is my first and perhaps most important piece of match advice:
***Do not rank a place where you would not want to go! If in your mind, "no internship" is better than "internship at Shitty Practice", DO NOT RANK "Shitty Practice"!***
7. There are intense, career-altering, being-banned-from-the-match-for-three-years sorts of ramifications for candidates that match to a place and then do not follow through on accepting the internship.
8. If you do not match, you enter a process called "the scramble". This is where all the unmatched candidates and programs desperately try to find each other, like lost lambs and panicked sheep in a crowded sale barn. There are apparently many frantic phone calls, e-mails, and hurried job offers flying back and forth.
Doesn't it sound like fun? Ugh.