Frequently Asked Questions

Resident Insider is a platform that connects verified medical students with verified residents for anonymous, paid messaging. Students get honest, unfiltered advice about residency programs, and residents earn money for sharing their experience.

Yes. Your name, email, and personal details are never shared with the other side. Students and residents only see each other as "Verified Student" and "Verified Resident." We verify your identity during signup but never reveal it in conversations.

Resident Insider covers two degree tracks: Medicine (MD/DO) — ACGME-accredited residency programs across 47 specialties, including combined and dual-track residencies such as Med-Peds, IM/Psychiatry and Peds/Emergency Medicine. Major specialties include Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Emergency Medicine, General Surgery, OB/GYN, Anesthesiology, Radiology, Orthopaedic Surgery, Dermatology, Neurology, Ophthalmology, Otolaryngology (ENT), Urology, Plastic Surgery, Radiation Oncology, Neurosurgery, Pathology, and PM&R. Podiatry (DPM) — all CPME-accredited programs nationwide.

Resident Insider runs in your browser and is fully optimized for mobile — there's no separate App Store or Google Play download. For an app-like experience, open myresidentinsider.com on your phone and tap "Get the App" in the menu; that opens short instructions for adding it to your home screen — a few taps through your browser's share menu, since iOS and Android both handle this themselves.

We publish public match data for Medicine (MD/DO), Podiatry (DPM), and International Medical Graduates (IMGs) — updated annually. Each track has its own dedicated page: myresidentinsider.com/stats/mddo covers NRMP match rates, a searchable every-specialty table, competitiveness tiers, and a DO-senior breakdown; myresidentinsider.com/stats/dpm covers CASPR match data, the multi-year applicant trend, and fill rates; myresidentinsider.com/stats/img covers US vs Non-US IMG match rates, IMG-friendly specialties, and multi-year trends. Start at the Match Statistics hub at myresidentinsider.com/stats or jump straight to your track below.

University and hospital email systems sometimes filter automated emails, even from senders configured correctly. First, check your spam or junk folder — that catches most cases. If it still hasn't arrived after a couple of minutes, click "Send a sign-in link instead" on the verification screen. That delivers a sign-in link from a different template that routinely threads through institutional filters. As a last resort, click the "email support" link on the same screen — your email will be pre-filled with the info we need, and we'll verify you manually within a day.

Resident Insider was built by two practicing US attendings. We've each been on every side of the match: student, applicant, resident, now attending. We built this because we wished it existed when we were applying — the honest take on programs only happens behind closed doors, and that information shouldn't be reserved for whoever happens to know the right person. We stay anonymous for the same reason our residents do: anonymity is what makes the truth possible. Professional retaliation for honest advice is a real risk in medicine, and the trust model that protects our residents also protects us.

Resident Insider Weekly is our free, opt-in editorial newsletter — one short read each week on the "hidden curriculum": the things medical school and residency don't formally teach you. Every issue is written for residents — personal finance, contracts, insurance, tough conversations, and the lawsuits-and-risk part of the job no one warns you about — with students reading along to see what's coming. Subscribe in two ways: the signup card on the homepage, or the default-checked consent checkbox during platform signup (which you can uncheck if you don't want it). Sends come from newsletter@news.myresidentinsider.com — a separate subdomain from our transactional email, so unsubscribing from the newsletter never affects account, payout, or verification emails. Every issue includes an unsubscribe link. Free, no ads, no third-party sharing of your email.

Sign up with your school email and enter the verification code we send you. Select your school and year, create a password, and you're ready to start messaging residents. We accept .edu, international academic domains (.edu.au, .ac.uk and similar), and named medical-school domains that follow neither pattern. Right now that list is exactly one — Rosalind Franklin's my.rfums.org, which covers Scholl College of Podiatric Medicine — so if your school's address is rejected, writing in really is the way through. If your school email is rejected and you believe it shouldn't be, email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll add it.

$50 for a Standard message (3-day response window) or $75 for a Priority message (1-day response window). If the resident doesn't respond within the time window, you get a full refund. If a resident becomes unavailable, any pending questions are automatically refunded. Each message is one question, one answer. There are no subscriptions, no hidden fees, and no recurring charges — you only pay when you send a message. Years of your life. A fifty-dollar question.

Yes. The account is free, and so is every student tool — Rotation Debriefs, the Interview Tracker, the Rank List, the Questions to Ask guides, The Right Words, Find Your Specialty, and Find Your Residency for DPM students. For students, the only charge on the platform is sending a question to a verified resident: $50 Standard or $75 Priority, refunded in full if they don't answer within the window. No subscriptions, no tiers.

Ask anything about the program and the training experience: culture, call schedule, autonomy, case and surgical volume, how the program treats its residents, fellowship and job placement, what they'd change, red flags — the honest, lived-experience things you can't find online. The one thing to keep out is personal medical or clinical advice; this is for program insight, not patient care. Residents can decline any question they'd rather not take, and you're refunded in full if they do, so there's no risk in asking something specific. Keep your own identifying details out of the question, too — anonymity protects both sides. One practical limit: a question is 10 to 500 characters, with a live counter as you type — long enough for real context, short enough that a resident can answer it properly.

Start with the questions only a resident can answer honestly — whether they'd rank the program again, the worst part nobody mentions, how much autonomy residents really get, who covers when someone is out. Our Questions to Ask guide has a curated list for MD/DO and IMG applicants and a separate one for DPM externships, each with five marked to start with. Copy one, paste it into your message, and ask one question per message so the resident can answer it properly.

There's nothing improper about it. Talking to current residents to research a program is something applicants have always done — at conferences, through mutual friends, on interview day. Resident Insider just makes it anonymous, structured, and open to everyone instead of only whoever knows the right person. It has no connection to the NRMP Match or the podiatry match run by National Matching Services, never touches your ERAS or CASPR application, and involves nothing a program would ever see. Schools don't typically have rules about how you research programs, but if yours has a policy on outside services, it's worth a quick check.

A few safeguards protect answer quality. Every answer must be at least 250 characters, so you won't get a one-line brush-off, and you choose who to ask partly on their displayed rating. After an answer arrives you have 7 days to rate it 1–5 stars, and those ratings carry weight: a resident whose average drops too low is warned, then reviewed by a real person, and residents who stay low-rated can lose their spot. Full refunds are reserved for when a resident doesn't respond, declines, or becomes unavailable — a delivered, substantive answer isn't refundable — but if an answer is genuinely off-topic or ignores what you asked, email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll look into it.

We email you the moment a verified resident submits their answer — no need to keep refreshing your dashboard. The email comes from support@myresidentinsider.com, so whitelist that address (or check your spam folder) if you don't see it. You'll also get an email whenever we refund your question — the resident declines, the response window expires, or their account becomes unavailable. Refunds are issued automatically to your original payment method and typically appear within 5–10 business days — the exact timing depends on your bank, not us. After the answer arrives, you have 7 days to rate the response from 1 to 5 stars from your dashboard. The rating row shows a clear countdown ("X days left to rate") so the deadline is visible — past 7 days the rating window closes.

No. Residents never see your name, email, school, or any identifying information. They only see your question and that it came from a verified student.

Yes. You can browse programs across any degree track and message any verified resident on the platform — you're never restricted to your own track. If the resident's degree differs from yours (e.g., you're a DPM student asking an MD/DO orthopedic resident), they may speak to their field generally rather than your specific track — and they can decline off-track questions at no cost to you.

You can watch any program that doesn't have a resident yet — just open the program and tap 'Watch This Program'. Up to five at a time; remove one to add another. You'll receive an email the moment a verified resident from that program signs up. Speed matters when the email arrives — each resident can take only 3 pending questions at a time, so early movers get their questions in before the queue fills. Every email includes an unsubscribe link, and the most requested programs get moved to the top of our recruitment list — you tell us where, we go get the insider.

Each resident can have up to 3 pending questions at a time. If a resident's queue is already full, you'll see an "At capacity" notice on their profile before you start writing — no wasted typing — and if another verified resident at the same program has capacity, we'll point you straight to them with a one-click link. Otherwise queues typically clear within 1–3 days as residents answer (priority questions clear in 1 day, standard in 3 days). This cap keeps answer quality high — residents aren't buried under a wall of questions they can't thoughtfully get to.

Yes. Your student dashboard has a Find Your Specialty tool: answer up to fourteen questions about how you want to practice — procedural mix, illness severity, weekly hours, schedule predictability, training length, research intensity, diagnostic ambiguity, team coordination, and more — and we rank twenty-four major MD/DO specialties against your stated preferences. Each match shows plain-English reasoning, cited data from NRMP, Medscape, ACGME, AAMC and the specialty societies (a few pay figures are triangulated across two or three of the Doximity, SalaryDr and Marit salary surveys — each row's note names which — and one is a blend of two Medscape figures) — with a note beside any figure that needs one saying exactly where it came from — and flags where a top match scores below 50/100 on an answer you gave. Open any match for its full profile — a typical day, training structure, match competitiveness (Step 2 means, fill rate, US MD and DO match rates, signaling weight), attending pay, lifestyle, practice characteristics, common misconceptions and subspecialty paths. You can compare any three side by side. It's a reasoning tool, not an answer key — surface tradeoffs you might otherwise miss, then verify with people actually in the field. Available to MD/DO and IMG students; DPM students follow a different match (CASPR), so the tool is gated accordingly.

All twenty-four MD/DO specialties that account for the large majority of NRMP, SF Match and AUA Match positions — the primary specialties most students weigh when applying directly from medical school (Ophthalmology and Urology run their own matches), from Internal Medicine and Family Medicine to Neurosurgery and Plastic Surgery. Smaller dedicated tracks — Child Neurology, Medical Genetics, Nuclear Medicine, Preventive Medicine, and Neurodevelopmental Disabilities — aren't included; they're real residencies, but they're typically chosen by students who already know that's where they're headed, not picked through cross-specialty comparison. Fellowship subspecialties (Cardiology, GI, Heme/Onc, Pulm/Crit Care, and the rest) are also outside the tool's scope — those come after residency, so they're not relevant to a Match-cycle decision. Med-Peds is included as its own profile; other combined paths like IM/Psych and IM/EM are covered through their component specialties.

Yes. Your student dashboard has a Find Your Residency tool: browse every CPME-accredited podiatry residency program in the US, organized by state. Each program shows its CPME-authoritative details (program type, authorized positions, accreditation status, program director, address, phone) plus city economics for the program's location (cost of living from BEA Regional Price Parities and median 1-bedroom rent from HUD Fair Market Rents). Each program also shows anonymous externship ratings — pooled letter grades from verified DPM students who externed there (more on how those work below). The goal is one organized place to research programs instead of digging through CPME PDFs, hospital sites, and AACPM individually. Available to DPM students; MD/DO students have a separate Find Your Specialty tool that ranks specialties against their preferences.

Externship ratings are anonymous, structured grades that verified DPM students leave for programs they've externed at, pooled into a per-program average on Find Your Residency. After a rotation you grade the program A–F across nine areas — surgical volume, case diversity, operative autonomy, clinic experience, teaching, didactics, facilities, culture & morale, and work-life — and answer two yes/no questions: whether you'd rank the program, and whether you'd recommend the externship itself to a classmate. We pool everyone's grades into a per-program letter grade for each area, plus the share who would rank it and the share who would recommend the externship, so you see how a program landed with students who were actually on the ground. When the two disagree, it usually means one of two things: a strong residency whose externship is thin, or a great month at a program the extern wouldn't personally choose. Both shares read as a count (3 of 4, say) until five externs have answered, and as a percentage after that; plus and minus grades appear once three externs have graded, so a lone grade never carries more precision than it has. It's fully anonymous: your name is never shown, and grades appear only as pooled averages alongside the number of externs who rated. One honest caveat: until a second extern rates a program, that average and both yes/no answers necessarily reflect a single person's grades, which is exactly why the extern count is shown next to it. A few rules keep the signal honest: only verified DPM students can rate; you can rate each program once (you can update or remove your own grade anytime); and you can rate up to ten programs total. Grades from externs who have graded three or more programs in the last two seasons are adjusted, in proportion to how many they have graded, for how generously they grade overall, so a habitually generous or harsh grader's habit is partly taken out of every program they graded. Only the last two externship seasons count toward a program's average, so older grades roll off automatically and the signal stays current — each program shows which season the grades are from. A season runs July through June and is written as a range (2025–26, for example), so a fall and a spring externship at the same program count as the same season and roll off together. Treat it as a first impression, not a verdict — each grade reflects one extern's experience over a roughly one-month rotation, not Resident Insider's opinion. It's a strong starting signal; for the real inside story on a specific program, ask a verified resident who actually trains there.

Yes — two tabs work together. The Interviews tab is where you log invites, update their status, and add notes after each one; it keeps your next interview at the top, and the day after each one it asks for a quick read — whether you'd rank the program, and a gut score out of five. Pick each program from the list when you log it, and the row tells you whether a verified resident from that program is on the platform so you can ask them before you rank, or lets you watch the program from the same row if nobody is there yet. The Rank List tab pulls every program from your interviews and your rotation/externship debriefs into one place, lets you weight what matters and score each program (pre-filled from your debrief ratings, and ordered by your gut score until you score the factors), and builds a ranked order you can reorder by hand — flagging where your gut differs from the scores. Both are free, private, and visible only to you.

Yes. Your student dashboard has a debrief tab — labelled Rotations for MD/DO students and Externships for DPM students — where you can capture each one while the experience is fresh: ratings across clinical and procedural/surgical exposure, education, environment, and lifestyle, plus a rank decision (Must Rank / Probable / Maybe / No) and a one-sentence gut feeling for each program. The questions adapt to your degree: DPM students get podiatry-specific fields like surgical case mix and hands-on scrub level; MD/DO students get a procedural-exposure rating plus four quick flags on culture, safety, and specialty fit. Everything stays private to you. MD/DO students: focus on aways, sub-Is, and your home program — the places you might rank, since every debrief seeds a row in your Rank List. DPM students: log every externship; the data compounds.

Yes. Your student dashboard has The Right Words — fill-in-the-blank email templates for the high-stakes moments of applying, in the order you meet them: outreach and mentorship (shadowing, research, away rotations, a personal-statement review), letters of recommendation, applying and interviewing (accepting, rescheduling, or declining an interview, a couples-match note, sharing a new Step score, expressing continued interest), after the interview (thank-yous, updates, second looks, a letter of intent, replying when a program asks how you'll rank it, withdrawing), after the Match (thanking mentors, introducing yourself to your program, SOAP), and a dedicated set for IMG and visa applicants (observership and US clinical experience requests, home-school documents, visa-sponsorship questions, mentorship outreach). Pick a template, fill in a few blanks, and copy it into your email. The sensitive ones carry a Match-rule note on how to stay inside the NRMP rules — the bright lines up front, the full rule a tap away — for example telling only one program it's your top choice and never asking a program how it will rank you. They're fixed templates rather than AI-generated text, because the pre-vetted wording is what keeps them safe. Free to MD/DO and IMG students; DPM students follow a different match (CASPR), so it's gated to MD/DO and IMG.

On our public Match Statistics page at myresidentinsider.com/stats, which has a full timeline for each track — Medicine (MD/DO) shows the ERAS and NRMP dates, Podiatry (DPM) shows CASPR and CRIP. Your dashboard carries the dates that apply to you: verified DPM first- to third-years see the AACPM externship cycle's next date, and fourth-years and graduates see the next CASPR, CRIP, or Match date. MD/DO students get a line under their dashboard header for the next interview they've logged, the day after each one a prompt for their read, and from the day NRMP ranking opens a countdown to the rank order list certification deadline.

Yes. On the signup page under Medicine (MD/DO), choose 'International Medical Graduate' — it covers both students and residents, and you'll be asked which one you are. As a student applying to US residency, you can sign up with any email address and verify with a code, then enter your medical school as free text rather than picking from the US list. Once verified you have full access to message residents at any US program. If you are already in a US residency, you sign up through the same option but follow the standard resident signup path instead: an institutional email (hospital, program, or .edu — personal Gmail and Yahoo addresses aren't accepted at signup), your NPI number, government-issued ID, and connecting a bank account for payouts. Payouts is what makes your profile go live to students; the verification itself is the 5 checks described elsewhere in this FAQ.

Sign up with your institutional email (.edu, hospital, or program email), enter the verification code, then provide your NPI number. After signing up, your dashboard prompts you to complete identity verification with a government-issued ID ($1.50 one-time fee, powered by Stripe — charged once; if you're ever double-charged, the duplicate is refunded automatically) and connect a bank account for payouts via Stripe Connect. Your profile goes live to students only once both identity verification AND payouts setup are complete — this keeps the platform clean of half-onboarded profiles that couldn't actually answer questions. Your listing goes live the moment those two steps are done — we don't hold you in a queue. Within 24 hours of that, a person looks you up by name against your program's published roster: a human verification layer the automated checks can't replicate, and part of what keeps the platform genuinely resident-only. If a listing doesn't hold up to that check, we take it down. The full signup-to-earning-ready flow takes about 10 minutes. Spots are limited to 2 insiders per specialty program — if your program is full, you can join the waitlist. Personal emails (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) are not accepted at signup — see below if your program doesn't issue you an institutional address.

Yes — email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll set you up manually. Some programs, especially those based in a private practice rather than a university or hospital system, don't issue their residents an address at all. The signup form can't tell that apart from someone simply preferring their personal inbox, so it turns the address away either way. Write in and we'll create the account for you. Nothing else about verification changes: you'll still complete identity verification with a government-issued ID, still connect a bank account for payouts, and a person still checks you by name against your program's published roster, within 24 hours of you joining. The email requirement is a filter, not the proof — the ID and the roster are.

Yes. If you're an international medical graduate currently in a US residency, you're eligible on exactly the same terms as any other resident — the same $25 and $38 per answer, the same anonymity, the same programs. On the signup page under Medicine (MD/DO), choose 'International Medical Graduate' and then 'In residency now'. You'll enter your medical school as free text instead of picking from the US-only list; everything after that is the standard resident signup path — institutional email, NPI, government-issued ID, then connecting a bank account for payouts, which is what makes your profile go live to students. Personal emails (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) aren't accepted at signup, IMG or otherwise. If your program doesn't issue you an institutional address at all, email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll set the account up for you.

You earn $25 for every Standard message you respond to, and $38 for Priority messages. Payouts are initiated automatically after each answer and typically arrive in your bank account in about 5 business days. That accounts for Stripe's charge-clearing period (~2 days), the standard payout delay (~2 days), and ACH to your bank (~1 day). Same cadence for every answer. In some cases Stripe extends this window for new accounts under additional verification — if yours does, it's their standard process, not something on our end. One thing worth knowing up front: your listing depends on payouts staying connected. If Stripe pauses them — it sometimes asks for an updated ID or proof of address — you can't answer questions while that's unresolved, including any already waiting in your queue, and your profile stops appearing to students. We email you as soon as it happens. Your program slot isn't taken away automatically in that situation; once you've completed verification, a person reviews it. One rare case runs the other way: if a student's payment for an answer is reversed after you have already been paid — usually a chargeback they file with their bank, occasionally a refund we issue — Stripe pulls that payout back out of your balance. We email you the amount when it happens, and the question stays in your history marked as reversed, so it is never something you find by noticing a smaller number.

The Lounge is a private, off-the-record space inside Resident Insider where verified residents talk to each other peer-to-peer. There's a general room for whatever's on your mind, plus rooms for academics, careers, finance, wellness, and venting. There's also a room for interesting clinical cases — diagnostic puzzles, unusual presentations, and cases worth learning from, with strict PHI rules pinned at the top. And a Guides room — a curated library of plain-English career guides covering the major decisions and documents of training: contracts, student loans, money and taxes, insurance, licensing, and fellowship, plus guides specific to your degree. Every claim is checked against the primary source and cited, and new guides are added as they're finished. There's also a Suggestions room only we can read — feature ideas and bugs go straight to us, and our replies come back to you in the same room. Now and then we post a poll in the General room; votes are anonymous and results appear only as totals. MD/DO and DPM each have their own Lounge with the same room set and House Rules. Audience-segregated at the data layer — verified MD/DO residents see only MD/DO members, verified DPM residents see only DPM members, never the other. Every voice in the room goes through the same 5-step verification you did — institutional email (.edu, hospital, or program email), NPI, a practice-location check, government ID, and a human check against their program's published roster. The roster check is the one a person does — within 24 hours of a resident joining, not before they appear. Where the location check can't confirm a match — NPPES addresses lag real moves — a person reviews the account by hand instead. So there are no bots, no throwaway accounts, and no students. That bar is also why moderation stays light: when every member has met it, the Lounge largely governs itself, and the House Rules (anonymity, patient privacy, mutual respect) are a quiet backstop, not a hovering presence. The Lounge unlocks automatically from your dashboard once you're live to students, and medical students and visitors can never access it.

Yes. Every member is assigned an automatic pseudonym — [Specialty (or degree, for DPM)] Insider R[PGY year]-[sequence] — for example, "IM Insider R2-001" is the first internal medicine resident to enter the Lounge, currently a PGY-2 — the year in the handle tracks your current PGY year and advances each July. The components come from your verified profile (specialty + year), and the sequence number is permanent and per-specialty (per-degree for DPM). You can't choose your handle and you can't change it — that's by design. A self-chosen handle ("MGHIM2027") could leak identity in two characters; an auto-generated one can't. Your real name, email, and program details are never shown to other Lounge members.

From your Resident Dashboard, click 'Set Up Payouts' on the setup checklist at the top of the page (or under Settings → Payouts). Select 'Individual' as your business type, enter your personal details and bank account info. Setup takes about 3–5 minutes — this is the bank-account step of the roughly 10-minute end-to-end signup flow. It's powered by Stripe, so your financial info is never shared with Resident Insider. Once connected, payouts are initiated automatically after each answer. Funds arrive in your bank in about 5 business days, measured from the moment the student's payment clears through ACH settlement.

You get an immediate email the moment a student sends you a question, so you never have to check the dashboard proactively. If you haven't answered with 24 hours of runway left on the Standard (3-day) tier or 12 hours of runway left on the Priority (1-day) tier, we send one reminder email with the dollar amount waiting — never more than one nudge per question. You'll also receive: a rating email after each answer (with the student's 1–5 score), a payout confirmation when funds are sent to your bank, a notice on the rare occasion a payout has to be reversed (see "How much do I earn per message?" above), a heads-up 30 days before your listing closes on the completion date on your profile, and account alerts if Stripe ever pauses payouts or your ratings need attention. If you use The Lounge, one quiet email when someone replies to you — no message content, never more than one per 15 minutes, and off anytime in Settings. Every email comes from support@myresidentinsider.com. No third-party sharing of your email, and no unsolicited marketing. The one piece of non-transactional email we send is the optional Resident Insider Weekly newsletter — opt-in only, with an unsubscribe link in every issue. If your institutional inbox isn't the one you check daily, you can route these to a personal email instead — Settings → Notifications on your dashboard. Signing in stays tied to your institutional email — login codes and password resets always go there — while everything else, including identity-verification emails, follows this setting. One deliberate exception: security alerts about your payout settings always go to your institutional email, so a change to your bank details can never be hidden from you.

No. Your identity is completely anonymous. Students never see your name, and we never share your information with programs, hospitals, or anyone else. You can speak freely.

We cap each residency program at 2 verified insiders to keep the platform exclusive. Fewer insiders per program means more messages directed to you and higher earnings. Important: the cap is per specialty program, not per hospital — at Johns Hopkins, for example, the Internal Medicine residency has its own 2-slot cap, the Psychiatry residency has a separate 2-slot cap, Emergency Medicine has its own, and so on. A large institution with 15+ specialties can easily support 15+ insiders total, just distributed across programs. If your specific program is full, you can join the waitlist; we email the next person in line in waitlist order when a slot opens, and the spot is held for you for 48 hours — sign up with the same email address you waitlisted with, and finish verifying within that window before we move on to the next person. Miss it and you can rejoin the waitlist at any time. Your slot stays yours through your training, as long as your payouts stay connected. It opens to the waitlist when your listing reaches the completion date on your profile. It also opens if someone verifies their ID but never finishes connecting payouts within 14 days — without payouts students can't reach them and they can't be paid, so the slot goes to someone who can use it. If that happens to you, finish connecting payouts and email us: we'll restore your slot if one is still open; if your program has filled up in the meantime, we'll work out next steps with you directly. Once you've been live, none of this applies to you — if Stripe pauses your payouts later, a person reviews it rather than a timer, and your slot stays yours while it's sorted out.

Sign up under Interventional Radiology — that's the residency you matched into, and it's a separate program from the diagnostic radiology residency at the same institution. It becomes your primary specialty and leads your profile. Once you're verified, email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll add your institution's diagnostic radiology listing beneath it, since that's where your early years are spent — so students searching either specialty can find you. One account, one verification, one set of earnings. Because each listing occupies one of the 2 slots at that program, we'll tell you if diagnostic radiology is already full at your institution.

Your account is active for the rest of your residency, based on the PGY year you enter at signup — a PGY-1 internal medicine account is active for 3 years, a PGY-2 general surgery account is active for 4 years, and so on. Each July 1, your PGY year automatically advances, and no action is needed on your part. If you're doing a preliminary or intern year before a different program, tick the box at signup: your listing says so, and your account runs to the end of that year rather than the length of the program you're rotating through. (Transitional Year is its own one-year specialty — just pick it as your program; there's no box to tick.) Either way, email support when you know where you're headed next and we'll move your listing with you. We email you a confirmation each July so you can flag any non-standard track (research year, gap, repeat, leave) by replying to support. If you've completed training (you reach the max PGY year for your specialty), your account expires naturally and the slot opens for the next cohort.

Right now, Resident Insider is residents only — fellowship is not currently supported. Your account stays active through the span of your residency, then closes on the July 1 that ends your final training year — even if you're staying on at the same institution for fellowship. If you're in a preliminary or transitional year, your listing closes at the end of that year instead; email support when you know where you've matched and we'll move your listing to the new program if there's a slot open there. If you're currently in your final year of residency, you're still eligible to join now and earn for the rest of your training year — applicants ask a lot of useful questions of graduating residents about the program experience, fellowship application advice, and rotation realities.

If you need to update your program, specialty, school, or other account details, contact support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll update it for you. For security and platform integrity, profile changes are handled manually by our team.

Resident Insider is not clinical work — no patient care is involved. You're simply sharing your personal experience anonymously. However, some residency programs have policies regarding outside employment or paid activities. It is your responsibility to review and comply with your program's moonlighting and outside employment policies before participating.

You can decline any question. There's no obligation to respond — the student is refunded in full right away instead of waiting out the window, and your star rating is unaffected (ratings come only from answered questions). Declined questions do count toward the response rate shown on your profile, the same way an expired one does. If a question is inappropriate or harassing, flag it instead of declining — flagged questions are excluded from that rate, and our team reviews every flag.

Standard messages must be answered within 3 days; Priority messages within 1 day. If you don't respond in time, the student receives a full refund. Answers must be at least 250 characters so students receive a thorough, meaningful response. You can have up to 3 pending messages at a time.

After you answer a question, the student has 7 days to rate your response from 1 to 5 stars. After 7 days the rating window closes — past that point your reputation on that answer is final. The student dashboard shows a clear countdown ("X days left to rate") so the deadline is visible. Your average rating is displayed on your profile, and you'll get an email each time you receive a new rating. Your rating sits on your listing where students choosing who to ask can see it. If your average falls to 4.0 or below after 8+ ratings, you'll receive a warning email — a soft heads-up so you can self-correct, not a flag. If it drops to 3.5 or below, your account is flagged for admin review — your profile stays visible to students while a human admin, never a script, reviews your recent activity and reaches out before any action is taken; you can reply to that email to share context. We don't auto-deactivate based on ratings alone, since 8 coordinated low ratings can be griefing rather than real feedback. Quality answers pay off.

A National Provider Identifier (NPI) is a unique 10-digit number that healthcare providers in the US apply for. We use it to confirm you exist in the federal NPPES registry as an individual provider, and — unless an operator has already verified you by hand — to cross-check the name on your government ID against that record. It is not a licence check: the registry stores a licence number that the provider reports themselves and that CMS never confirms with any state board, and we deliberately accept the leftover student taxonomy that many residents still carry. You can find yours at npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov.

Most quirks are handled automatically — no action needed on your end. If your NPPES practice location doesn't match your program's state (e.g., you finished intern year in one state and moved to residency in another, but your NPPES LOCATION still shows the old state), the system verifies you normally — a person checks every profile against the program's published roster within 24 hours of joining, so a stale address never holds you up. If your NPPES record has "no practice location on file" (only a MAILING address, no LOCATION yet), your account is auto-routed to our review team: you'll see a "Manual verification queued" message at signup and get an email within a day when approved. You can speed that case up by adding a LOCATION address at nppes.cms.hhs.gov. One more case: if your NPI was issued long enough before your program start that our automatic date check can't place it (an earlier career, a non-traditional path), your account is auto-routed to review the same way — you'll see the "Manual verification queued" message and get an email within a day. No further action needed on your end. Being in a fellowship or subspecialty training does NOT trigger this; a fellowship taxonomy on your NPI is accepted and verifies normally. And a quick note on taxonomy: a leftover "student" code on your NPI — very common right after Match, since programs can take weeks to update it and you have no control over it — does not hold you up at all. The system accepts it and verifies you normally. Still stuck? Email support@myresidentinsider.com — we'll help directly.

Residents are independent contractors. Stripe collects your tax information securely during payout setup and issues the appropriate IRS tax form if your earnings cross the applicable federal reporting threshold for the year. Resident Insider does not handle your tax reporting — Stripe manages it directly. Thresholds and forms change from year to year, so consult a tax professional for questions about reporting your earnings.

The Contract Decoder is a tool for verified MD/DO and DPM residents that reads your first attending employment contract and explains it in plain English, clause by clause. Upload your contract (PDF or Word) and it lays out what each section means, what your specific terms actually say, and how they compare to what's common in physician employment contracts — flagging the clauses most worth a closer look, putting real dollar figures on what's at stake, and giving you the concrete questions to ask before you sign. You get the breakdown on-screen and as a downloadable PDF you can keep or hand to an attorney. It's built for a high-stakes moment that medical training never covers. The Contract Decoder is an educational tool, not legal advice — for advice on your situation, have a licensed attorney in your state review your contract.

Your first decode is free for every verified MD/DO or DPM resident. After that, each decode is a flat $50 — there's no subscription, and a paid decode is identical to the free one. The $50 is charged at checkout; if a decode fails or the file isn't a physician contract, your credit goes back automatically so you can try again — and on the rare occasion that return doesn't go through, we're alerted and we'll put it right. Decode credits never expire, and purchases are final.

Yes. Your resident dashboard has a Find Your Fellowship tool: every podiatric fellowship we can verify, in one directory, each labelled with its current standing — ACFAS Recognized or Research, ACFAS Conditional (including Probationary), CPME-accredited (including Provisional or Probation), or AENS-recognized — and where a program holds none of those right now, it carries a plain "No Current Accreditation" label instead, so you can see a program's standing (or the absence of one) before you apply, and filter by surgical focus, compare the structure and funding behind each program, and save a personal shortlist. Available to verified DPM residents.

Yes. Your resident dashboard has The Attending Leap — a toolkit for landing and starting your first attending job. It pairs two things. First, fill-in-the-blank email templates for the moments that matter: applying to a posted position, reaching out to groups and recruiters, requesting references, scheduling, following up on, and declining interviews, acknowledging and responding to offers, checking in with your credentialing coordinator, moving a start date when credentialing slips, closing out with your program and colleagues when you finish, and a dedicated set for visa holders. Second, a residency-to-attending transition checklist you can tick off as you go, phased from a year out to your first weeks as an attending, covering state licensing, your DEA registration, hospital credentialing and the separate payer-enrollment track, malpractice and tail coverage, and the financial and onboarding steps training never covers — and the items that need an email hand off to it. The templates stay out of salary and contract negotiation — that's what the Contract Decoder is for — and the checklist points you to the right professionals (a licensed attorney, a tax or financial advisor, your GME office) rather than giving advice. Available to verified MD/DO residents.