A Guide To All The Pitt Fanfiction Writers On How Med School And Residency Works

A guide to all The Pitt fanfiction writers on how Med School and Residency works

I love you all, you are doing amazing things, but here is some extra helpful information to help you write more accurate fanfics

Medical School is 4 years long. Typically, the first 2 years are in the classroom, and year 3 and year 4 are clinical years.

Year 3 is when your medical school sends you on rotations (usually lasting 4 weeks) and you end up basically rotating at different specialties.

Javadi is a 3rd year on a 4 week rotation. If your fic is set a month after the events of season 1, she is not working there. If you want to include her in your fanfic, put her on a surgery rotation with Dr. Garcia so she is back in the ED doing surgical things! Or put her on inpatient medicine (aka the doctor that does the medicine at the hospital) and have her come down to the ED to admit a patient.

4th year medical students typically have more say in where they are rotating. they still are only doing 4 week (and sometimes 2 week!) rotations. A lot of the time, 4th year's are "auditioning" or working "sub-i's" which means they are acting like an intern at a residency program in hopes that the residency program will want to hire/match that student

Whitaker is a 4th year student and likely auditioning to be an emergency medicine doctor at The Pitt. If your fic is set sometime in July of the next year, he is now a doctor!

Med students don't place orders, but it's fine if you get this wrong, the TV show did too.

Match day!!! They day where all 4th year medical students find out where they will end up working. On a Monday in March, students find out if they matched at a residency program, and on a Friday, they find out where. (If you want to learn about the SOAP process, you can ask me, but we don't need to get into that for fic writing)

The beginning of residency starts July 1st, which is why Season 2 of The Pitt being on July 4th will be really interesting! The intern class will be doctors for 3 whole days at that point!

Most emergency medicine residencies are only 3 years long, but The Pitt is four years long. (There is actually a lot of hot debate about extending all EM residencies to 4 years)

Santos is an intern/PGY-1 (post grad year 1) she is a baby doctor. We never ACTUALLY learn what Santos matched in to. Part of me thinks she is in a "transitional year" which is sometimes a 1 year program for people to be a doctor but still want to apply to another program (hence why she wanted a letter of rec from Javadi's mom). She ALSO is doing 4 week rotations and will probably spend time at other rotations (like surgery 👀, ob, icu)

Year 2 residents and year 3 residents will rotate at different hospitals (Hence why Mel just came from the VA.) Year 2 is when a lot of emergency medicine residents REALLY start working in the ER, as your first year you are off doing other rotations.

Year 4 is when you can be elected as a chief resident. Not all PGY-4's are chiefs. You typically get elected for the role by your fellow residents and faculty (that would be Robby and Abbot). The amount of chief residents is dependent on the size of the residency program

After your 4th year, you graduate and can become an attending (again Robby, Abbot and Shen -> who is a new attending) or you can do a fellowship! Which is what Langdon was applying for and why he needed Robby's letter of rec.

Residents are working 60-80 hour weeks and making maybe 65k a year

Hours are NOT SET for residents. Those residents working the night shift, probably are only working the night shift that week and then are switching to days. Attendings, however, do choose if they work days or nights.

Obviously there is a lot more to this, but here are some basics!