Recruitment doesn’t wait for interview season anymore. Somewhere around March, program social media accounts start posting links to virtual info sessions, and by June there’s usually more happening than you can keep up with.
The sessions themselves are casual. An hour on Zoom, free to register, open to whoever signs up. Programs use the time to walk through their curriculum, put a few faces on screen, and let their residents do most of the talking. You use it to figure out whether that program deserves one of the slots on your ERAS list.
And every cycle, the same questions come back around. Does going help me get an interview? Is this worth an evening? What am I supposed to ask, and what makes me look like I didn’t do my homework?
In This guide IMG Helping Hands covers all of it, for IMGs and U.S. students both.
Strip away the name and it’s an online information session run by a residency program. Zoom most of the time. Teams or Webex occasionally. Forty-five minutes to an hour, free, and you register through a link the program posts.
The naming is where people get confused, because no two programs call it the same thing. You’ll see:
Same event, different label.
Timing is scattered too. Spring and summer is the busy stretch, well before applications get reviewed. But plenty of programs run sessions during interview season as well, sometimes open to everyone, sometimes only for applicants they’ve already invited.
Worth saying up front, since it causes a lot of unnecessary anxiety: nobody is grading you. There’s no score and no note going into a file somewhere. The point is to hear from a program directly instead of guessing from a webpage that hasn’t been updated in four years.
Both sides want something out of the hour. Knowing what each side wants makes the whole thing easier to read.
A website can’t show you what a place feels like, and that’s the gap these sessions fill. Programs get to break the curriculum down year by year, put the program director and some core faculty on camera, and talk about how they support residents when the work gets heavy. Research comes up, along with what it actually looks like for someone in their second year rather than in theory.
There’s a recruitment angle too, obviously. More applicants hearing about them in June means a stronger pool in September.
Your side is simpler. You’re collecting information you can’t get anywhere else.
You hear how residents describe their own program, which tells you far more than any brochure. You can ask the same three questions at six different open houses and line the answers up side by side. And you find out whether a place actually fits what you want before you spend money applying there.
Short version: nobody can give you a universal answer, because there isn’t one.
Nearly every program hosting one of these will tell you outright that attendance is optional. Showing up doesn’t buy you an interview. Skipping one doesn’t get you screened out. When a program is working through thousands of applications in October, the filters they’re running are scores, experiences, letters, and the rest of your application data. Not a registration list from May.
So why bother?
Because the information changes what you do next. Find out mid-session that a program has never sponsored a visa and you just saved yourself an application fee. Hear that they’ve placed residents into nephrology fellowships three years running and that program moves up your list. Neither of those facts was sitting on the website.
It also gives your later conversations something to stand on. “I joined your open house in June and one of your PGY-3s talked about the QI curriculum” lands differently from “I’m very interested in your program.” One of those is specific. The other is what everybody writes.
Do some programs track who registered? A few do. Plenty don’t. You have no way of knowing which is which, so go because the hour is useful to you, not because you’re expecting credit for it.
Scores, experiences, and letters are what programs filter on in October. We help IMGs build an ERAS portfolio that survives that filter.
Every program runs these a little differently, but the shape is usually familiar.
It opens with the program director. A short welcome, some program history, how many residents they take, what they’re proud of. Core faculty introduce themselves next, sometimes department leadership as well.
Then the resident panel, which is the part you actually came for.
After that comes the content: curriculum broken down by year, call structure, which hospitals you rotate through and how far apart they sit. Fellowship placements for recent graduates. Research opportunities, and whether anyone gets protected time for them. Wellness and support resources. Diversity and recruitment efforts.
Q&A closes it out, usually run through the chat box.
Some programs squeeze all of that into sixty minutes. Others do a fifteen-minute slide deck and hand the rest over to their residents. A few skip slides entirely and just talk.
Yes. And you probably get more out of them than anyone else in the room.
A U.S. student has advisors, alumni, and a career office feeding them information. You’re working with a program website and whatever you can dig up in a Facebook group. An open house closes part of that gap in an hour.
Listen for whether a program is genuinely IMG-friendly rather than just neutral about it. How do they describe their current residents? Where did those residents train? If IMGs are sitting on the panel, you’re getting a far more honest read than any statistics page will give you.
Visa sponsorship comes up sometimes. Some programs address it directly in the presentation, others point you toward a resources page. Either way you leave knowing more than you walked in with.
Then there’s the money. Applications aren’t cheap, and the fees climb once you cross into the higher tiers. If three open houses talk you out of three programs that were never going to work, that’s an evening well spent.
One last thing. This is not an interview. You’re not auditioning. Go in to learn.
Book a free call with mentors who have matched as IMGs and know which programs sponsor visas, take international graduates, and are worth your application fee.
Good questions get you answers. Lazy ones get you a spoken version of the website. Pull from these.
One rule above all the rest: don’t ask anything the website already answers clearly. Asking how many ICU weeks there are when it’s printed on the rotation page tells everyone in the room that you showed up cold. Mentors have been repeating this for years and applicants keep doing it anyway.
Nothing complicated here. Behave the way you would on a clinic day.
Do
Don’t
Most sessions run questions through the chat box, and that’s usually your best route in. Keep them short so the moderator can read them out without having to edit on the fly.
Our interview preparation program runs mock residency interviews with feedback, so the first time you answer under pressure is not on the day it counts.
Same handful of mistakes, every single cycle.
Some applicants treat it like an interview. They over-prepare, sit stiffly, rehearse an introduction nobody asked for, and miss half of what’s said because they’re waiting for their turn to speak.
Others swing too far the other way. Camera off, joined from bed, no questions ready, tab closed after fifteen minutes. An hour gone with nothing to show for it.
Then there’s showing up without reading the program page first. Ten minutes beforehand would have doubled what you got out of the session.
A lot of people also drop off right after the director finishes and skip the resident panel, which is genuinely the most useful twenty minutes of the whole thing.
And almost everybody forgets to take notes. By your eighth open house, every program has blurred into one. Keep a document with a page per program: fellowship placements, visa information, whatever stood out, whether you’d actually want to train there. Come September, that file is worth more than you’d expect.
There’s no master calendar. Programs advertise on their own, so you have to look in a few places.
Program websites come first. Check the residency page and anything labeled for prospective applicants, since registration links usually go up there before they go anywhere else.
Program emails matter if you’ve contacted them before. You may already be on a list without realizing it.
Social media is underrated here. Plenty of residency programs run their own Instagram or X accounts, and announcements often show up there first.
Specialty organizations sometimes circulate program events to their members. And if you’re a U.S. student or a recent graduate with access, your school’s career office may send a list around.
Plain networking works too. Coordinators and current residents post these announcements publicly all the time.
Practical advice: block twenty minutes once a week through spring and summer to check the programs on your list. Notice is often short, sometimes only a week or two, and seats do fill up.
No. Programs say so repeatedly, and they mean it. Attending isn’t a requirement for applying or interviewing.
If the format allows it and the panel can see attendees, yes. If it’s a large webinar where everyone’s hidden by default, leave it off. Don’t be the only face on screen.
As many as you want. Just watch for scheduling clashes, because programs tend to pick the same popular evening slots.
A short thank-you to the coordinator is fine if you asked something specific or had a real exchange. Don’t send a long letter of interest after a general information session. It reads as trying too hard.
Business casual is plenty. A collared shirt or a simple blouse does the job. No suit required.
Yes. These are generally open to all applicants, and many programs specifically want IMGs there.
Treat these events for what they are. Not an audition, not a box to check, just an hour that tells you more about a program than its website ever will.
Go in prepared, act like a professional, and keep your expectations where they belong. Attendance won’t hand you an interview, and nobody is scoring your questions in the chat. What you walk away with is information, and information is the difference between an application list you built on purpose and one you built by guessing.
Sit in on a few. Take notes you’ll actually read later. Then use what you learned to decide where your application really belongs.
IMG Helping Hands works with international graduates from USCE and ERAS through to interview day. Bring your notes, we will help you turn them into a strategy.
Articles published by IMG Helping Hands are prepared by our team using information from direct experience, publicly available resources, and educational references. AI tools may be used to assist with drafting, proofreading, and formatting, however, all content undergoes review and approval before publication.
The information provided is intended for educational purposes only. Requirements, policies, and processes may change over time. Readers should consult official sources for the most current information.
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