There are some older threads out there but I was hoping that some of you have heard something about the program, how difficult it is to get the scholarship, and how much your life would suck afterwards (both financial and otherwise). I'm in the middle of Teach for America so I definitely understand the working for an underserved population, but I don't want to pursue the scholarship it it's going to set me back in my career or if I won't be happy. Do many people do this program?
- I am currently in the program.
- The NHSC is actually a part of the Public Health Service, but it is best known for its scholarship and loan repayment programs.
- The scholarship process just changed this year. Two years ago, they stopped requiring interviews. This year, they changed the process from a multiple-choice questionaire to 5 essay questions.
- The scholarship is fairly competitive, although no one is completely clear on how they decide who to give the scholarship to. Back when it was a questionaire, there were rumors that your answers gave you a certain "score," but that's all moot now.
- A fair number of people do this program, although probably more than we see in PA. It's probably more popular in certain areas of the country - i.e. regions that are fairly rural and qualify as medically underserved.
- The scholarship pays for all of your tuition and a lot of your expenses. You pay them back with one year of service for one year of scholarship, with a minimum payback requirement of 2 years.
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The difficulty with the scholarship is that it locks you in to certain medical specialties: Internal Medicine, Family Med, Peds, Psych, or OB/gyn. If you realize during your 3rd year that you love emergency medicine, too bad. If you realize that you absolutely LOVE orthopedics or anesthesiology, you're out of luck. You MUST practice one of those five specialties (although exceptions would probably be made for some combos - for instance, Med-Peds, or Pediatric Psych, etc.)
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NOTE: You MUST pay back your service requirement as soon as you leave residency. You do not have the option of doing a fellowship first, except for a few very specific instances (ex: You can do an OB fellowship or a geriatrics fellowship after a family med residency, but you canNOT do a sports medicine fellowship after a family med residency. And you can't do a GI or a cardiology fellowship after IM, at least not until you've finished your service payback.)
- You can do residency wherever you want. But you must practice in a federally designated underserved area. They decide which areas you can serve in based on a federally designated HPSA score, which has to be more than 14.
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IF you are pro-active and really on the ball about finding a job, you can go wherever in the country you want. If you proscratinate, though, the government will randomly place you wherever they need you.
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IF you skip out on your scholarship, or you realize at some point that primary care is not for you, you will owe the government THREE TIMES as much as they paid.