A PhysEmp newsletter
Residency is hard. The newsletter doesn't have to be. Straight talk on the parts of training nobody puts in the orientation packet: schedules, money, burnout, and what comes after. Written for residents and fellows, and read by more than 3,500 of them and the people trying to recruit them.
Schedules, money, sleep, and burnout.
What residents are actually talking about, sourced from their own communities.
Fellowship, first job, first contract.
September 20, 2026
You can hold an unrestricted medical license in your state and still be unable to get credentialed for a single urgent care shift. Both of those things are true at the same time, and neither one is a bug.
Read on Substack →September 13, 2026
You’re trusted to run the code at 3 AM and call the time of death yourself. You’re not trusted to say out loud that it wrecked you, without first calculating who might write it down.
Read on Substack →September 6, 2026
Residency teaches you to run a code, read a CT, and titrate pressors in the dark. It does not teach you how the place actually works. The schedule, the paperwork, the coverage math, the research pipeline, the benefits portal — all of it operates on you from day one, and…
Read on Substack →August 30, 2026
A PGY-2 shows up for the first day of a new rotation, gets handed a pager, a list of 14 patients, and a five-minute tour of the workroom. By noon she’s cross-covering. By day three she’s expected to know which attending wants a call before ordering CTs and which one…
Read on Substack →August 23, 2026
You’re trusted to make critical medical decisions at 3 a.m. But you may not get fifteen quiet minutes to figure out whether one loan repayment plan could cost you $180,000 more than another over the next ten years. Both matter, but the second kind of decision is much easier to…
Read on Substack →August 16, 2026
You're trusted to run a code at 3 AM. You're not trusted with a copy of your own employment contract until three weeks before you sign it, and even then, nobody in your program will read it with you.That's the gap this week. Not clinical knowledge — you have that,…
Read on Substack →Free, short, and considerably more fun than your pager.
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