Rutgers Health Transitional Year Residency

at Community Medical Center

A Message from the Program Director

Thank you for your interest in the Rutgers Health Transitional Year Residency Program. This program seeks to be the premier Transitional Year program in the country and we continue to deliver on leading innovations for what a foundational PGY-1 training should encompass. Our program focuses on a clinical experience that prioritizes your learning, establishing your independent clinical expertise while ensuring complete faculty and senior resident support. We adapt our block rotations to fit your educational goals and interests and are proud to say we have a program with the most elective blocks of any Transitional Year residency program. We are committed to providing the best possible clinical training by immersing you in medically complex patients within a busy hospital setting, a comprehensive as well as supportive educational program, and excellent research opportunities.

We have 16 ACGME accredited PGY-1 positions, we accept applications only through ERAS and participate in the NRMP match. Six of our 16 spots are linked to advanced placement programs in other Rutgers Health PGY-2+ residency programs such as Diagnostic Radiology, Interventional Radiology, Radiation Oncology and the nation's top residency in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. These linked spots provide a categorical like experience for the resident taking away the difficulties with moving across the country from PGY-1 to PGY-2 year and also prioritize your immersion in your PGY-2 specialty beginning from day one. We work closely with your future PGY-2+ program directors to ensure your PGY-1 educational content matches the goals of your PGY-2 program.

Our program focuses on training the best physicians in the country and all of our current and previous residents have matched to our PGY-1 program and their desired PGY-2 specialty and program of choice at the same time. Our program has never needed to participate in the SOAP process. We review every ERAS application but prioritize those who are well prepared to match to their PGY-2 specialty. We focus on the entire applicant and not just on STEP or COMLEX scores and interview allopathic, osteopathic and ECFMG certified medical graduates. We conduct all of our interviews virtually via Zoom, to reduce the time commitment, travel chaos and financial burden for the applicant.

We are dedicated to providing a learning environment that values diversity and inclusiveness and teaches physicians to work in inter-professional teams. We are a patient-focused program that emphasizes an empathetic, high quality and team player approach to patient care. This program has been designed to be flexible with the largest number of elective blocks allowed to enable the resident to tailor the program to their future goals. The main clinical site has 107 residents in house from established residencies in Emergency Medicine, Internal Medicine, General Surgery, Podiatry and Pharmacy that you will be interacting with very closely. The Rutgers Health system has residency and fellowship programs in nearly every specialty available across 14 hospitals throughout New Jersey with over 1,600 residents and fellows. We are the sixth largest graduate medical education system in the US.

The mission of this residency program is to provide residents with a top-tier, comprehensive, broad-based and structured clinical, didactic as well as procedural education in both the inpatient and outpatient settings that will enable the resident to become a competent, proficient and professional physician in their subsequent residency training. We have created a program that is owned and invested in by our residents and faculty, with resident wellness and balance being one of our top priorities.