Wound Care

What Is Wound Care Fellowship?

Wound care fellowship is a post-residency credential typically completed over one year that trains surgeons and proceduralists in the comprehensive management of complex, chronic, and acute wounds. It sits at the intersection of surgery, wound biology, and chronic disease management—and it is substantively different from the wound-adjacent training that happens incidentally inside vascular or plastic surgery residencies.

Two bodies accredit wound care fellowships in the US context. The American Board of Wound Management (ABWM) and the American Professional Wound Care Association (APWCA) each offer credentialing pathways, though the landscape of formal, ACGME-accredited wound care fellowships remains smaller than in more established surgical subspecialties. Many programs operate outside ACGME oversight, which means applicants need to evaluate program structure, mentorship, and graduate outcomes individually rather than relying on a single accreditation stamp. This is a known feature of the field, not a disqualifying one.

Distinguishing wound care fellowship from wound-adjacent training in other specialties matters for applicants. Vascular surgery training emphasizes limb perfusion and revascularization as the primary intervention; wound closure is downstream of that. Plastic surgery training emphasizes tissue rearrangement, flap design, and reconstructive hierarchy. Wound care fellowship, by contrast, centers the wound itself—its biology, its chronicity, its systemic drivers, and the full toolkit from topical agents to negative-pressure wound therapy (NPWT) to hyperbaric oxygen to surgical debridement—as the organizing clinical problem. General surgery residents are better positioned for this than they often realize.

Why General Surgery Is the Primary Feeder

General surgery residency builds the procedural and clinical substrate that wound care fellowship deepens. The connection is not incidental. Consider what a general surgery resident actually does by the end of training: sharp debridement of infected wounds, split-thickness skin grafting, ostomy creation and revision, fasciotomy and its aftermath, negative-pressure wound therapy initiation, and complex post-operative wound management after bowel resection, hernia repair, and trauma laparotomy. These are not peripheral experiences—they are core general surgery competencies.

The OR-based procedural fluency that general surgery develops—tissue handling, hemostasis, anatomical orientation in contaminated fields—translates directly to the wound OR, where debridement of diabetic foot infections, flap rotation for pressure injuries, and skin grafting for venous stasis ulcers require exactly that foundation. A wound care fellow who cannot confidently handle a scalpel in a chronic wound is behind from day one; most general surgery graduates are not.

The ostomy experience deserves particular emphasis. General surgeons are the primary ostomy creators in most institutions, and wound care fellowships frequently include stomal therapy and peristomal wound management as a formal component. Residents who have managed stoma complications—retraction, parastomal herniation, skin breakdown—arrive at fellowship with genuine clinical credibility in this domain.

The pipeline is also shaped by career structure. General surgeons in private practice or academic settings who develop wound panels are often the physicians running wound centers. They built those practices on the general surgery credential plus fellowship training, and they recruit fellows who look like earlier versions of themselves.

Core Competencies Shared Between Residency and Fellowship

The competency overlap is precise enough to map explicitly, because understanding it helps applicants write better personal statements and helps residents identify which rotations and cases to prioritize.

• Sharp debridement: General surgery teaches this in the OR on infected wounds, dehisced fasciotomies, and necrotizing soft tissue infections. Fellowship extends it to clinic-based debridement, serial debridement protocols, and debridement decision algorithms in patients with ischemia, coagulopathy, or diabetes.
• Split-thickness skin grafting (STSG): Residents perform STSGs after trauma and burns, and in the coverage of large wound beds. Fellowship formalizes graft site preparation, bioburden assessment prior to grafting, and graft failure analysis—extending the same skill into a more protocolized, chronic-wound context.
• Negative-pressure wound therapy (NPWT): Residents initiate NPWT on contaminated abdominal closures, sternal wounds, and extremity wounds. Fellowship covers advanced NPWT with instillation, single-use systems, and NPWT as a bridge to definitive closure in chronic wounds.
• Ostomy management: Residents create and revise ostomies. Fellowship adds the stomal therapy component—appliance selection, peristomal skin protection, patient education frameworks, and complication management—in partnership with wound, ostomy, and continence (WOC) nurses.
• Diabetic limb salvage decision-making: General surgery residents encounter diabetic foot infections in the acute setting—deciding between local debridement, minor amputation, and urgent OR exploration. Fellowship extends this to longitudinal limb salvage strategy: offloading, wound progression monitoring, vascular collaboration triggers, and the chronic care coordination that prevents amputation over months.
• Wound assessment frameworks: Residents learn to describe wounds functionally. Fellowship formalizes grading systems (Wagner, University of Texas, WIfI for ischemia), documentation standards, and payer-relevant outcome metrics—skills that matter immediately in any wound center leadership role.

Day-in-the-Life: Wound Care Fellow vs. General Surgery Resident

The contrast here is one of progression, not discontinuity. A general surgery resident operates under urgency—trauma activations, emergency bowel operations, acute wound complications at 2 a.m. A wound care fellow operates under continuity—following the same patients through wound trajectories over weeks and months, adjusting treatment based on tissue response rather than crisis.

A typical wound care fellow's day might look like this:

• Morning: Wound clinic, seeing eight to fourteen patients with a mix of diabetic foot ulcers, venous leg ulcers, post-surgical dehiscences, and pressure injuries. Each encounter involves wound measurement, photodocumentation, debridement where indicated, dressing selection, and care coordination with nursing, podiatry, or vascular surgery.
• Midday: Hyperbaric oxygen unit, reviewing treatment plans for patients with compromised flaps, refractory diabetic foot wounds, or radiation-induced tissue injury. This is a procedural and prescribing role, not passive monitoring.
• Afternoon: Multidisciplinary limb preservation rounds, where the fellow presents wound status to vascular surgery, orthopedics, endocrinology, and infectious disease. The fellow is the longitudinal expert in the room—the one who knows what the wound looked like six weeks ago and what it looks like today.
• OR half-day (two to three times weekly at higher-volume programs): Debridement, skin grafting, minor amputations, flap procedures, wound VAC placements under anesthesia.

A general surgery resident's day involves: early rounds across a mixed surgical census, an OR schedule built around attending cases, afternoon admissions and consults, and overnight call with acute surgical emergencies. The wound encounters are real but episodic—a post-op wound check here, an NSTI debriding there—embedded within a much broader acute surgical scope.

The transition from resident to fellow in this field is a transition from episodic wound exposure to wound continuity. Applicants who have sought out continuity experiences during residency—following patients in wound clinic rather than only managing acute wound complications—will adapt faster and signal more genuine fit.

Patient Populations and Clinical Overlap

Shared patient panels are where genuine clinical interest develops or fails to. The populations that dominate wound care practice are the same populations that general surgery residents encounter regularly, which makes authentic interest plausible—but only if residents actually engage longitudinally rather than handing off.

• Diabetic foot ulcers and infections: General surgery residents debride, drain, and amputate toes and forefoot in patients with diabetes. What the wound care framework adds is the chronic ulcer that preceded the acute infection—its trajectory, offloading failure, and the team-based prevention model that reduces amputation rates. Residents who follow these patients after acute debridement, rather than discharging them to primary care, begin to understand the chronic disease model that wound care embodies.
• Venous leg ulcers: Common, often undertreated, and frequently managed poorly in acute care settings. General surgery residents see these when they're infected or when they present alongside vascular pathology. Fellowship teaches compression therapy titration, wound bed preparation, and the evidence-based protocols that achieve durable closure.
• Pressure injuries: General surgery residents encounter these as post-operative complications, in trauma patients, and in consults from medicine services. Fellowship formalizes staging, prevention protocols, and the reconstructive ladder from local wound care to flap coverage—with particular attention to the comorbidity management that makes any intervention durable.
• Post-operative wound dehiscence and surgical site infection (SSI): General surgery produces these complications, and general surgeons manage them. Fellowship elevates this from reactive management to systematic wound closure planning—understanding which dehiscences will close with NPWT, which need regrafting, and which have underlying biology (radiation, immunosuppression, poor perfusion) that requires modification of the treatment plan.
• Radiation-induced wounds: Less common in general surgery training but increasingly prevalent as oncologic survivorship extends. Hyperbaric oxygen and advanced wound care are the primary tools; general surgery residents who rotate through oncology services build the index case exposure that makes this population familiar rather than foreign.

How to Build a Wound Care Narrative in Medical School

Building a credible wound care narrative in medical school requires more intentionality than most other surgical subspecialties because wound care fellowship programs are evaluating genuine, longitudinal interest—not just procedural exposure. The field is small enough that reviewers can distinguish applicants who sought out wound care from those who stumbled across it.

Rotations that build genuine signal:

• General surgery: The foundation. Prioritize programs with wound clinics attached to the surgical service. Ask explicitly to attend wound care rounds or clinic sessions; most programs will accommodate a motivated medical student.
• Vascular surgery: Limb preservation is a core vascular surgery activity, and wound care fellows collaborate constantly with vascular surgeons. A vascular rotation builds understanding of perfusion assessment, arterial wound characteristics, and the revascularization-then-wound-care sequence that governs complex diabetic foot management.
• Plastic surgery: Skin grafting, flap physiology, and wound bed preparation are taught more explicitly in plastics than anywhere else. Even a brief sub-internship rotation adds technical vocabulary and procedural fluency that wound care fellowship values.
• Endocrinology or internal medicine with diabetes focus: Understanding the systemic disease driving wound chronicity—glycemic control targets, neuropathy staging, nephropathy impact on wound healing—makes an applicant a more complete clinician in this field. This rotation is underutilized as a signal-builder.

Clinical volunteer and observational experiences:

• Wound clinics attached to academic medical centers often accept volunteer clinical assistants. Even documentation or dressing change assistance builds vocabulary and patient exposure.
• Limb preservation centers—increasingly organized as multidisciplinary programs at major academic centers—are high-signal environments. A letter from an attending at a limb preservation center carries specificity that a generic surgical letter cannot.
• Community health settings with high diabetic foot burden (federally qualified health centers, VA wound clinics) offer both exposure and the health equity framing that many fellowship programs find compelling in scholarly work.

Research entry points for medical students:

• Chart review studies examining surgical site infection rates, wound closure timelines, or amputation outcomes are feasible without laboratory infrastructure and producible within a single academic year.
• Quality improvement projects in wound documentation, staging accuracy, or NPWT utilization protocols can be done in collaboration with nursing or hospital quality teams—and demonstrate the multidisciplinary collaboration that defines wound care practice.
• Case reports on unusual wound presentations are appropriate for medical students and publishable in wound-specific journals; they build journal familiarity and attending relationships simultaneously.

Research and Scholarly Activity That Signals Fit

Wound care as a field has a genuine and growing evidence base. Applicants who engage with that evidence base—rather than treating wound care as a purely technical or clinical craft—signal intellectual seriousness that fellowship programs value.

High-signal project types:

• Wound healing biology: Angiogenesis, growth factor signaling, biofilm formation and disruption, extracellular matrix dynamics, and the impact of systemic disease on wound biology are all active research areas. Medical students can contribute to basic science labs or participate in translational projects connecting bench findings to clinical outcomes.
• Biofilm research: Chronic wound biofilm is now recognized as a primary driver of wound chronicity, and interventions targeting biofilm (antimicrobial dressings, debridement frequency, topical antiseptics) are actively studied. Projects evaluating biofilm burden before and after debridement, or comparing antiseptic protocols, are clinically feasible and publishable.
• Advanced dressings and device trials: Randomized controlled trials comparing wound dressings, NPWT protocols, or bioengineered skin substitutes are conducted at major wound centers. Medical student participation as a study coordinator or data analyst builds both research credentials and industry awareness relevant to later career paths.
• Quality improvement in wound outcomes: Hospital-acquired pressure injury prevention programs, SSI reduction protocols, and amputation rate benchmarking are all active QI areas. A QI project with before-and-after data and a presentation at a departmental or regional conference is achievable in MS3 or MS4 and demonstrates the systems-level thinking wound care leadership requires.
• Health disparities in wound care access: Amputation rates and wound care access are profoundly unequal by race, socioeconomic status, and geography. Scholarship in this area is increasingly recognized in fellowship applications and aligns with NIH and CMS priority areas.

Journals and societies worth knowing:

• Wound Repair and Regeneration and International Wound Journal are peer-reviewed journals where wound care original research appears. Familiarity with their scope—and ideally a submission or accepted publication—signals that an applicant reads the primary literature rather than only textbooks.
• The Symposium on Advanced Wound Care (SAWC) is the major national wound care conference. Presenting a poster or attending as a medical student (many programs offer subsidized registration) builds network and vocabulary simultaneously.
• The Wound, Ostomy, and Continence Nurses Society (WOCN) conference is multidisciplinary and physician-attended; understanding the nursing framework for wound care is professionally relevant and shows the breadth that fellowship programs expect.
• The Association for the Advancement of Wound Care (AAWC) and the American College of Wound Healing and Tissue Repair are physician-facing organizations with student and trainee membership categories.

Letters of Recommendation Strategy

In a small fellowship ecosystem, letters carry disproportionate weight because programs often know the letter writers personally. The strategic question is not just who writes the letter but what each letter is positioned to demonstrate.

Attendings whose letters carry specific weight:

• A wound care fellowship-trained surgeon: The highest-signal letter, if available. A letter from someone who completed the fellowship you are applying to—or who knows the fellowship directors—carries interpersonal weight beyond content. If your institution has a wound center, identify the surgical director and pursue a rotation there with enough time to produce a meaningful clinical relationship before asking.
• A vascular surgeon with limb preservation emphasis: Vascular surgery and wound care are clinically intertwined; a vascular attending who can speak to your judgment in limb salvage decisions, your wound assessment skills, and your ability to function in multidisciplinary rounds is highly credible to wound care fellowship reviewers.
• A plastic surgeon: If you have real plastics exposure—not a one-day observation—a plastics letter speaks directly to skin grafting technique, wound bed preparation, and reconstructive thinking. Do not pursue this letter if your plastics exposure was superficial; the letter will read as thin.
• A general surgery program director or chief (for residency applicants building toward fellowship): A PD letter that explicitly addresses wound care exposure, technical skill development, and professional maturity signals that your interest is recognized within your training program rather than peripheral to it.

Framing the general surgery LOR for wound-care purposes:

Before asking a general surgery attending for a letter, provide them with a specific list of wound care-relevant cases you shared, your wound clinic attendance record, any research you completed, and the career narrative you are building. Attendings write better letters when they have specifics. Ask explicitly: "I'd like the letter to address my wound assessment skills, my approach to debridement decision-making in [specific case type], and my work on [research project] if you're comfortable doing so." This is not inappropriate coaching—it is helping a busy clinician write a letter that actually serves your application.

What to avoid:

• A letter from a general internal medicine attending who cannot speak to procedural competence or surgical judgment. Even if the relationship is strong, the content will not map to what fellowship programs are evaluating.
• Three letters that are substantively identical in what they observe—all covering OR performance without any outpatient, chronic care, or research dimension. Fellowship programs want to see that different parts of your training produced different evidence of fit.
• Asking too early, before you have enough clinical interaction to support a specific letter. A generic letter from a high-status attending is weaker than a specific letter from a less-famous one.

Personal Statement Framing for Wound-Care-Interested Applicants

The personal statement for wound care fellowship has one structural job: demonstrate that your interest is specific, earned, and durable. Programs are too small to take chances on applicants treating wound care as a fallback or a curiosity. The statement needs to show the intellectual and clinical journey, not just the destination.

A functional structure:

1. Anchor case (one paragraph): Open with a specific patient encounter that crystallized your interest. Not a harrowing trauma case with a wound—that reads as acute surgery interest. The better anchor is a chronic wound patient whose trajectory taught you something: why wounds become chronic, why standard management failed, what a systems-level intervention changed. Specificity (tissue type, clinical decision point, what you did and why) distinguishes a real anchor from a constructed one. Fellowship reviewers have seen enough of both to tell the difference.
2. Skill convergence (one to two paragraphs): Map the competencies you bring. Sharp debridement you learned in the general surgery OR. Wound biology you explored in your research on biofilm or growth factors. Multidisciplinary care you practiced in the limb preservation clinic. The goal is not to list credentials—it is to show that the skills wound care fellowship requires are ones you have been building with intention, not ones you expect fellowship to provide from scratch.
3. Why the fellowship pathway (one paragraph): Be direct about why wound care fellowship specifically—not vascular, not plastic surgery—is the right credential for the career you are building. This requires knowing something about the fellowship programs you are applying to, which means reading program websites, talking to current fellows if possible, and understanding what each program emphasizes (academic research, hyperbaric medicine, community limb preservation, industry collaboration).
4. Long-term career vision (one paragraph): Specific is better than aspirational. "Academic wound center director with a research focus on biofilm-targeted debridement protocols" is more credible than "make a difference in wound care." The career paths in this field are real and varied—academic limb preservation, rural access wound care, private practice wound panel, hyperbaric medicine codirectorship, industry or biotech liaison role. Knowing which one you are building toward, and why, closes the statement with intellectual honesty rather than motivational generality.

Where Fit Breaks Down: Misalignments Worth Knowing

This section uses program-side framing to decode what fellowship programs are actually evaluating—not to assign stigma to any applicant profile, but to help applicants identify and address genuine gaps before they become application liabilities.

• Treating wound care as a backup specialty: Programs in this field are small enough that reviewers can assess whether an applicant's primary interest was elsewhere and wound care was a contingency. An application with a personal statement built around acute trauma surgery, a publication list entirely in trauma outcomes, and letters from trauma surgeons who never mention wound care reads as a rerouted application. The fix is not to obscure that history but to reframe it honestly: what in your training shifted your focus, and when? A credible reorientation narrative is stronger than a constructed one.
• No outpatient clinic exposure: Wound care is fundamentally an outpatient chronic care discipline with procedural components. An applicant who has only managed wounds in the inpatient or OR setting has a real gap. Fellowship programs know that continuity of wound care—following the same patient's wound over multiple visits—builds clinical judgment that episodic acute exposure does not. If you have no outpatient wound exposure, address this directly in your application and describe what you are doing to acquire it.
• Overemphasis on operative volume without chronic care interest: "I want to do more procedures" is not a wound care fellowship motivation. The field is procedural, but the procedures are embedded in longitudinal patient relationships and chronic disease management. An applicant who demonstrates discomfort with the chronic care, counseling, and team-coordination components of wound practice will not thrive in the fellowship and programs can often identify this pattern in interviews.
• No engagement with wound biology or evidence base: Wound care has a serious and growing scientific literature. Applicants who cannot discuss wound healing phases, biofilm biology, or the evidence base for a dressing category they claim to use reveal that their wound care interest is technical rather than intellectual. Fellowship programs, especially academic ones, are looking for clinician-scientists or at minimum clinicians who engage critically with evidence.

Career Trajectories After Wound Care Fellowship

The career paths after wound care fellowship are more varied than applicants often realize, which is both an opportunity and a planning challenge. Understanding the realistic landscape helps applicants choose programs and frame their applications more precisely.

• Academic wound center director: Major academic medical centers run dedicated wound centers with research programs, fellowship training, and multidisciplinary clinical operations. The academic wound surgeon runs or co-runs this operation, maintains a clinical wound practice, supervises fellows and residents, and produces scholarship in wound biology or clinical outcomes. This path rewards research productivity during and after fellowship and requires the academic appointment infrastructure that a university-affiliated program provides.
• Private practice general surgery with wound panel: Many general surgeons with wound care fellowship training build outpatient wound panels within private practice or community hospital group settings. The wound clinic becomes a regular component of a practice that may still include operative general surgery. This is probably the most common career structure for fellowship graduates and offers a well-defined work pattern with predictable scheduling compared to acute surgery.
• Hyperbaric medicine codirectorship: Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) is a reimbursable intervention for specific wound indications, and many wound centers operate HBOT units. Wound care fellowship-trained physicians who pursue additional HBOT credentialing can serve as hyperbaric program medical directors—a distinct administrative and clinical role with growing demand as HBOT units expand in community hospitals.
• Industry and biotech liaison: Wound care is a substantial industry sector—advanced dressings, bioengineered skin substitutes, NPWT devices, and growth factor biologics are all commercial product categories with active development pipelines. Fellowship-trained wound surgeons are recruited into medical affairs, clinical trial leadership, and advisory roles by companies in this space. For applicants with strong research backgrounds and interest in the product development pipeline, this is a realistic and financially distinct trajectory from clinical practice.
• Rural and underserved access care: Diabetic foot amputation rates are strikingly higher in rural and underserved communities where wound care expertise is absent or intermittent. Fellowship-trained wound surgeons who choose community or rural practice fill a real access gap and often qualify for loan repayment programs and practice incentives. This path is less discussed in academic fellowship culture but is both impactful and professionally sustainable.

Income and lifestyle vary across these paths in ways that parallel the general surgery practice structure variability—see the site's career outcome data pages for current figures rather than relying on figures quoted here, which shift with market conditions and geography.

How Competitive Is This Fellowship? Honest Landscape

Wound care fellowship is smaller and less systematized than ACGME-accredited surgical subspecialty fellowships, which creates both opportunity and uncertainty for applicants. An honest account requires holding both.

The total number of accredited wound care fellowship programs in the US is substantially smaller than in fields like colorectal surgery, surgical oncology, or acute care surgery. This means the applicant pool is concentrated, program selection is high-stakes, and relationship-based matching (attending recommendations, prior rotation contacts) plays a proportionally larger role than in large-volume fellowship cycles.

Because the fellowship landscape is not uniformly centralized through a single match process comparable to the NRMP surgical fellowship matches, application timelines, file components, and evaluation criteria vary by program. Applicants should contact programs directly early in the process to understand their specific requirements for the application year in question.

The typical applicant entering wound care fellowship is a completing or recently completed general surgery resident, though vascular surgery, podiatric surgery, and plastic surgery graduates also appear in the applicant pool at certain programs. Step score thresholds, board performance benchmarks, and research expectations vary by program prestige and academic orientation—programs embedded in research-active academic centers weight scholarship more heavily than community-based programs. See the site's data pages for current landscape figures.

The relatively small program count also means that a strong letter from a known wound care surgeon carries outsized weight. Programs in this field are often built around one or two key faculty with national reputations; a letter from someone who knows that faculty member—or from a prior fellow in the program—is noticed in a way that would be diluted in a field with hundreds of programs.

For general surgery residents with genuine wound care exposure and a coherent narrative, the competitive picture is workable. For applicants approaching the fellowship without wound-specific preparation, the small program count reduces the margin for a generic application to succeed.

Action Steps by Training Year

This is a working checklist, not a motivational arc. Every item is actionable. Adjust timing to your actual calendar using the current season timeline on this site.

MS1

• Identify whether your institution has a wound center or limb preservation program. Find the surgical director's name and read their published work.
• Contact the wound center coordinator about observational or volunteer opportunities. Even one afternoon per month builds vocabulary and establishes presence.
• Begin reading the wound healing literature at an accessible level: review articles in Wound Repair and Regeneration or uptodate-level clinical overviews of diabetic foot ulcer management.

MS2

• Approach a wound care or vascular surgery attending about a research project. Chart review and QI projects are feasible without lab space. Define a question, propose a timeline, and get explicit agreement on authorship expectations before starting.
• Attend SAWC as a student if finances and scheduling permit. Student registration is available; the exposure to practicing wound care clinicians and current evidence is worth the investment.
• Join a wound care-related professional organization at the student member level. This costs little and builds a paper trail of engagement.

MS3

• During your general surgery clerkship, explicitly request wound clinic sessions. Document the cases you see—wound type, debridement decision, dressing selection rationale—as structured notes you can reference later in your personal statement and interviews.
• If your school allows elective or selective time during MS3, consider adding a vascular surgery or plastic surgery half-rotation focused on limb preservation or wound reconstruction.
• Submit your MS2 research to a regional conference for presentation, or to a wound-specific journal for publication. A submitted manuscript is more credible than work described as "in progress."

MS4

• Select sub-internship rotations with wound care signal in mind. A sub-I at an institution with a wound center or limb preservation program—even away from your home program—builds both experience and a potential letter relationship.
• Identify your three letter writers and approach them no later than mid-MS4. Provide each with a briefing document: your wound care exposure history, the research you completed, the career narrative you are building, and specific asks for what you want the letter to address.
• Draft your personal statement using the structure above. Have it reviewed by a wound care attending before submitting; they will catch clinical inaccuracies that a general career advisor will miss.
• Confirm application requirements directly with each program you are targeting. Fellowship programs outside ACGME oversight do not necessarily use a centralized application portal; some require direct contact and materials submission to program coordinators.

Intern Year and Early Residency

• Request wound service elective time during residency if your program offers it. Longitudinal wound clinic exposure during residency is the single most credible addition to a wound care fellowship application from a general surgery resident.
• Maintain your research relationships. A publication that appears during residency—especially one where you are corresponding or senior author—demonstrates independent scholarly activity that fellowship programs value.
• Identify wound care fellowship directors at programs you are targeting and attend their sessions at national surgical meetings. An introduction at a conference, followed by a brief professional follow-up email, is legitimate relationship-building in a field where everyone knows everyone.
• Begin the fellowship application process on the timeline appropriate to your graduation year. Because timelines vary by program and are not fully centralized, contact programs directly in the year prior to your intended fellowship start to confirm their current application cycle. See the current season timeline on this site.