UPJ INSIGHT: Twitter Footprint and the Match in the COVID-19 Era: Understanding the Relationship between Applicant Online Activity and Residency Match Success

By: Laura Bukavina, MD, MPH; Justin Dubin, MD; Ilaha Isali, MD; Adam Calaway, MD; Sherry Mortach, BS; Stacy Loeb, MD, Alexander Kutikov, MD, Kirtishri Mishra, MD, Mohit Sindhani, MS, Franoise Adan, MD, Lee Ponsky, MD | Posted on: 01 Jul 2022

Bukavina L, Dubin J, Isali I et al: Twitter footprint and the Match in the COVID-19 era: understanding the relationship between applicant online activity and residency match success. Urol Pract 2022; 9: 331.

Study Need and Importance

With the advent of COVID-19, many residency candidates have been restricted in their ability to complete away rotations and other academically relevant activities. Given the importance of interaction between candidates and their desired program, these limitations likely had major impacts on the 2020–2021 match. In recent years, social media (SoMe) have helped foster connections between people all around the world. Twitter specifically has become a candidate’s modern “business card,” offering applicants a networking opportunity.

What We Found

Data acquired from the Twitter application programming interface, including tweets, likes, and retweets for matched and unmatched applicants on Twitter, were verified with the American Urological Association and external processes. A total of 28,500 English language posts from 295 unique usernames were utilized in the analysis. Matched applicants generally showed a higher number of tweets (171 vs 83, p=0.001), and followers (171 vs 83, p=0.001) and likes (2.57 vs 1.5, p=0.048). Our analysis further highlighted there was a spike of new accounts created in May 2020 across both groups. Matched applicants were not only more likely to tweet overall (308.42 vs 146.23), but were also more likely to tweet “positive” content based on natural language processing (42.13% vs 38.88%). When assessing the relationship between respective matched program and matched applicant, 65.13% of the time an applicant and program mutually followed each other on Twitter prior to matching, with neither the program nor the applicant following each other only 5.88% of the time.

“Matched applicants were not only more likely to tweet overall (308.42 vs 146.23), but were also more likely to tweet “positive” content based on natural language processing (42.13% vs 38.88%).”

Limitations

While our representation of the matched and unmatched cohorts on Twitter is in line with American Urological Association demographics, identification of individual applicant factors such as letter of recommendation, clerkship grades and honors, among other factors, are not accessible for this analysis. Furthermore, there may exist inherent characteristics of the applicants who are more active on Twitter that are not analyzed in this study, allowing for a more successful residency match not analyzed by our parameters.

Interpretation for the Future

The academic landscape for residency and fellowship applicants has drastically changed due to virtual platforms. While programs and applicants both try to navigate the logistics of a changing environment, we hope our study provides candidates guidance on how to best express interest in particular residency programs and establish mentorship opportunities through the use of SoMe. Future studies might also focus on pragmatism, ie what might be most useful to applicants and programs, with practical instruction on how to best incorporate SoMe platforms into their application in real time.