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Analysis Of Anonymous Student Narratives About Experiences With Emergency Medicine Residency Programs, Molly Estes, Jacob Garcia, Ronnie Ren, Mark Olaf, Shannon Moffett, Michael Galuska, Xiao C. Zhang

Department of Emergency Medicine Faculty Papers

Background: Academic emergency medicine (EM) communities have viewed anonymous online communities (AOC) such as Reddit or specialty-specific “applicant spreadsheets” as poor advising resources. Despite this, robust EM AOCs exist, with large user bases and heavy readership. Insights about applicants’ authentic experiences can be critical for applicants and program leadership decision-making. To date, there are no EM studies to qualitatively assess EM AOC narratives during the application cycle. Our goal was to perform a qualitative analysis of students’ EM program experiences through a publicly available AOC. Methods: This was a qualitative analysis of a publicly available, time-stamped, user-locked AOC dataset: “Official …