Thank you so much! I appreciate your insight into my "CV" and advice on how to proceed moving forward. I'll be sure to get involved in rads research asap. I do have two follow-up questions if you don't mind.
1. What should I do about AIs? The earliest I can take an elective is July - the start of 4th year. While my home rads program has a bunch of different electives available, none of them are specifically designated as AIs. Should I seek them out at other institutions via VSAS?
2. I'm not familiar yet with the rankings of different DR programs. What's an example of a good academic program or a better-tier community program? Also, how do you define a "hybrid" program?
1. As far as I'm aware, there are no AI's in DR at any med schools (there weren't when I was an MS4 several years ago); if some have since been established, it's certainly not the norm. I'm sure IR AI's have been established at some places, but again it's not the norm. An AI in medicine or surgery will be fine. So, no; you don't need to a rads AI as they either don't exist at any institution or are scarce. Some people would expand the medicine or surgery as do it in anything, e.g., OB/GYN, peds, urology, or whatever is easiest. While this would almost certainly be ok, a neurotic person reviewing your application may think you're dual-applying to that specialty. Again, prob not but perhaps a reason to stick with traditional medicine or general surgery.
Two strategies: do it early to secure a better letter of rec or do it late in the academic year after interviews and focus on easy rotations early in MS4 to try and work on a rads research project. If you do it in July or August for the purpose of a letter, that's prob a month you won't be able to spend much time devoted to research (if you choose to do more research).
2. Familiarize yourself with the Doximity.com residency ranking system and, while there are several general ranking threads in the archives of this forum on SDN and also AuntMinnie.com, the most well-known is probably p53's 2009 thread:
Top 25 radiology program list from auntminnie.com. I'd link the doximity one, but you need to register to see it in its entirety. There are MANY criticisms about both these rankings, you can search this forum for other discussions of radiology residency rankings.
As for academics, community programs, and hybrid programs, this probably describes it better than I will:
https://radsresident.com/2017/06/24/what-to-look-for-in-a-radiology-residency/. Basically, it's what the attendings do and what umbrella the residency program is run under. Academics will typically have strong (or some) research with academic radiologists whereas the others will have less emphasis on research (or little to no research) and run by either private practice radiologists or university-affiliated or employed radiologists that essentially act as a PP rads. The top 5 listed programs on Doximity.com are UCSF, MGH, MIR, NYU, and Duke and these are academic medical centers. An example of a good community program is Baylor Dallas. I'm not familiar with the tiers of community and hybrid programs to list/rank them. Again, old ranking threads in SDN and AuntMinnie.com attempt this.