Thank you letter 9--revisit, To second year resident

Dear Dxxxx,

Thank you for showing me around during my second visit to the program. I am happy to have a chance to see how psychiatry residents worked and studied in the hospital. I can see the life of residents is busy, but also interesting and rewarding. As I have said, if I continue my career in xxxxx, it would seem reasonable to most people, and I am sure I can do well. But I regard psychiatry as something exciting for me. And I am well aware of the rapid progress in psychiatry in the recent 10-20 years. I would expect more dramatic changes to be happened in this field in the next 10 years. It is definitely the right time for me to step into this field, given my strong interest in psychiatry. 

I am very interested in your thought of switching to research. For me, although my research work has been very successful, I am more fulfilled with clinical oriented research work that may be directly applied to patient care. Besides, pure basic research work becomes more and more difficult to get funded due to the continuous cut in the recent few years. NIH also announced that they would tend to support “translational research” more than the pure basic research work, given the already cut granting level. In my opinion, if you really want to do research work, the “translational research”, or clinical oriented research, whatever you call it, is the way to go. By doing clinical oriented research, you can also take advantage of your clinical background, and avoid competing with pure researcher who have very strong training background in molecular biology research.  

I have hoped we could have more time to discuss during my visit, but we didn’t. If you have anything to discuss with me, you can always send me an email. I will send Dr. Xiu an email to show my determination to join this program. I have met about one third of the faculty and one third of the residents. I feel I am already very familiar with this program and this is the place where I should belong. 

You already noticed from my application materials that I have strong background in clinical xxxxxxology and research. But you won’t know my other potentials just from those materials. In my research work, manuscript preparation and presentations, I use several statistical software including SPSS, instat, sigmaplot etc., and I am an expert in photoshop, adobe illustrator, powerpoint, and excel. As a matter of fact, I am good at presentations and have won several awards from the xxxx Society, American xxxx Association and American Society of xxxxx. I am very experienced with bioinfomatics, particularly xxxxx data analysis, xxxxxxx and xxxx design. With our xxxxx technique in the laboratory, I am also handling xxxxxxx images and videos. As you may already aware of, I am a very easy-going person and offer help whenever there is a need. This has made me popular wherever I worked. I am pretty sure that apart from doing my job as a resident, I have a lot more to contribute. I will be a very good team member.    

Again, thank you very much for showing me the cases. It was nice meeting you. I hope we can work together in the near future. 

Best Regards 

Riverside