OIT has a very unique niche in the job market hunt, specifically for the Medical Imaging students. Rather than attempt to wax on the subject myself, Chin (Silver) Chan volunteered some of his time to elaborate on the unique opportunities provided by the MIT Department. Enjoy!!
For All current and Prospective
OIT Medical Imaging Students:
My name is Chin Silver Chan and I am a student office aide for the Student Success Center at the library. I was asked by my supervisor to write some blog entries and as it has been a long time since I have written a blog I’ll have to ask you to bear with me.
All Medical Imaging Technology (MIT for short) students in their senior year have to extern out to a hospital in another city. This is because our local hospital could not possibly handle the large number of students that rotate every year. Yet at the same time our students need a certain amount of clinical experience by law before we’re allowed to take the registry exam with our governing board and become certified to work in the US. It’s similar to how lawyers need to take the BAR exam in order to practice.
Where you extern at is highly variable - pretty much if any hospital is willing to work out the contract with OIT and your program director then it could be a potential extern site so long as you can fulfill your clinical competencies there. For x-ray, the vast majority of our sites are in Oregon. Usually a hospital in every major city here will take one of us every year. I know we currently have established sites in Eugene, Salem, Medford, Bend, Portland, La Grande, etc. However for the other medical imaging programs the sites are more diverse. My friends in Echocardiography have told me that their sites are all over the country: New York, Ohio, Texas, and more.
Note: If you have friends in higher places at a hospital, you could have them sponsor you and, with the help of your program director, you can establish your own personal extern site.
So how do you know which site you get?
Well that is determined by the infamous “draw”.
In order to be fair to all juniors (such as yours truly) who are about to extern next year, they will do a drawing for extern sites. Before the draw your program director will have gathered enough hospital contracts that will be equal or slightly greater than the current juniors. Be advised that these contracts are extremely fickle and could change even the minute before the draw.
Anyways, all of the students in your program gather together with your professors and they call out an extern site at random. For example they’ll say like “Oregon Health Science University in Portland”, and then whoever is interested in that site will throw in a piece of paper with their name on it into a bucket. They will draw a name at random from that bucket and that person gets that site. They will keep drawing until everyone has a site. What this means is if you have just enough sites for juniors then someone will HAVE to be stuck with an extern site that potentially no one wanted. However fear not, for at the end of the draw you’ll be allowed to trade each other sites if desired. With some shrewd bargaining you’ll be able to get somewhere that you will remotely like…hopefully.
So what are the advantages to each site?
Besides the location, some sites have more advantages than others such as a stipend, paid health insurance, child care, etc. However, students are usually not aware of the perks of each site until AFTER the draw is over - in order not to influence their choices. Some sites are better than others to learn certain specialties, for example if one wanted to specialize in the Catheterization Lab and other interventional type procedures, they would be best served by externing to a place like OHSU, which is a level 1 trauma center and could provide more learning opportunities. Also, it is likely that your extern site will become your first job for at least a few years since they have already seen what you can do during externship.
So all of this is a simple process right? Basically, everything is determined by luck but a lot of people have trouble agreeing with it. I can’t say I blame them as I like to plan out my own future. However, you need to get use to the idea that the draw is really an illusion of choice so don’t have your heart set on any particular site or you might suffer. Before joining a program you need to be willing to move wherever for a year and do what it takes to succeed. Some of the previous juniors I have talked to have said that they didn’t even draw what was on their top 10 choices on their list.
Externship is really all about showing off what you’ve learned in school and making your own opportunities. Even though the x-ray program has a 99% pass rate on our registry, no amount of quality training will absolutely guarantee success. Only you can determine that, and with that said I want to wish everyone good luck and hope you enjoy the ride!
