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.
October 11, 2026
A former resident who trained on Fontans and liver transplants called her old attending from her first private-practice job, mildly panicked. Her new group runs four GI rooms at once and does big vascular cases solo, no arterial line. Nothing she’d learned was wrong. It just turned out a good…
Read on Substack →October 4, 2026
You are trusted to run a code at 3 a.m. without waking an attending. You are not trusted to know, in advance, that your first moonlighting check will arrive at 53% of what you earned.
Read on Substack →September 27, 2026
You’re trusted to run a crashing septic patient at 4 a.m. with an attending on the phone. You’re not trusted with a straight answer to “if I take eight weeks of parental leave, does my graduation date move?”
Read on Substack →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 →Free, short, and considerably more fun than your pager.
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