It's incredibly hard to rank residency programs, there are too many factors involved. Where to live, quality of training, hospital size, call schedule... the list goes on. How can you be sure you are giving each option a fair chance, and factoring in the most important criteria in your rankings?
I created Plought to help my wife decide what residencies she should rank higher and lower and help her make the best possible decision.
Plought adds structure to the decision making process allowing you to individually evaluate options, and be sure you are considering the factors that are the most important to you and your family when deciding where to complete your training.
This approach is for medical students building a rank list, as well as couples and families who need to balance training quality with location, lifestyle, partner job options, and long-term fit.
Build your residency program shortlist
First, create a list of alternatives to consider. In this case, residency programs. For example, if you were trying to match into pediatrics, you might start with a list of the top residencies. Here are some of the top programs at the time of writing on Admit.
- Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
- Boston Children's Hospital
- Cincinnati Children's
- Baylor (Houston)
- University of Washington
Plought can also research more options for you with OpenAI's LLMs if you need to evaluate more options.
Choose the right criteria for ranking residency programs
Once you have a list of options to start with, then you can create the criteria you want to evaluate them by. For example, you might really want to be located in the NW since you have family there. You can create a Location criteria to be sure this gets factored into your decision making process. Here's an example of a set of criteria to evaluate the options on.
- Location
- Quality of Training
- Lifestyle
- Call Schedule
- Job Market for Spouse
- Public School Ratings
The first app Plought offers allows you to weigh each criteria. Here you can choose what is the most important to you. For example Quality of Training might be 50% of your score, while Lifestyle might not be as important so you could weight it as 10%.
Score each residency program consistently
Next, Plought gives you a framework to score each residency against each criteria (0-10). University of Washington might get a great location score since it's close to your family so you give it a 10. While the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia might get the best Quality of training score if you did a rotation there and had a great experience with their team.
Select the magnifying glass next to each option to have Plought AI research the specific option and criteria if you aren't sure what to score.
Compare residency programs head to head
Plought is designed to have you evaluate each alternatives in different ways to get the most complete answer for your decision. Next, Plought will have you compare each option against the others individually to see how they stack up against each other. This is more of a gut feeling check that may help you uncover which options you prefer to others easier than seeing them all at once.
Allocate points across your residency options
Finally, Plought will have you allocate points each alternative by criteria. This method allows you to think hard about each criteria individually for all the alternatives at once. Once you have completed the allocations for each criteria, you can view your results.
Review your residency ranking results
Plought provides four different analyses based on your inputs to help you understand your alternatives and a robustness module to allow you to see how your results hold up if you weighted your criteria in different ways.
Weighted sum combines your criterion weights and scores into a single total, pairwise comparison checks how often one program beats another head to head, point allocation forces you to distribute limited points across options for each criterion, and TOPSIS ranks programs by how close they are to an ideal profile and how far they are from the worst-case one.
The robustness view is useful because small changes in your weights can sometimes change the order of your top programs. If a program stays near the top even when those weights move around a bit, you can be more confident that it fits what matters most to you.
Together, these analyses give you a more structured and complete picture of your options before you finalize a rank list. If you're building a residency ranking now, start with a shortlist, define your criteria, and work through the process in Plought. The tool will not make the decision for you, but it can help you make a more deliberate one.