Question regarding LoR from Department Chief for Fellowship ERAS

[deleted1108671]

This is a question more about ERAS than Neonatology itself, so if someone has a better idea on where to post this, let me know.

My partner and I are both residents in pediatrics, and she will be applying to Neonatology Fellowships this upcoming application cycle.

She has a LoR being written by the department (division) chair of neonatology at our hospital, who is a practicing attending that she has worked together with personally.

ERAS has a checkbox when creating an LoR entry about whether your letter comes from a department chair, which I know some programs require or prefer when applying. To my understanding, how this typically works is, assuming you haven't worked with the chair physician directly, the chair essentially co-signs the LoR, alongside the relevant attendings you worked with while rotating, so multiple docs sign the letter. But in her case - she worked directly with the chair, so it wouldn't be a group letter, but still a "personal" one. Does that make sense?

So, my question: Should she check the box and indicate the letter is from the Chair? I don't want her to miss out on having a chair letter in case a program she applies to ends up requiring this. But I also don't want her to mistakenly misrepresent the type of letter she's submitting (i.e., it's not from a department "group" - is that expected?) and get in trouble for that. My gut feeling is to have her check the box ("Yes, this is from the chair"), but want to make sure this wouldn't be an accident faux pas. Any thoughts?

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[SurfingDoctor]

I can’t imagine that matters. But heads of divisions are usually chiefs, heads of departments are usually chairs, if you are looking for proper nomenclature. Thus, I wouldn’t say chair, cause they aren’t. A chair letter shouldn’t be necessary for an application (I’ve actually never seen one) because you would never interact with them. They are almost exclusively administrators. The only residents I could think that would interact with the chair in any capacity would be the chief residents. Heck, I’ve been faculty for 8 years and I don’t think my chair knows my name.

 

[doodle_doc]

I only checked the "chair" box for the letter that came from my actual department chair - meaning, the chair of pediatrics. I also got a letter from the neonatology division chief but did not label this as a chair letter given that this individual has a different role.

At least, that's how I interpreted things when I did my application last year (and for residency apps).

(FWIW, I also disagree with the sentiment above about how no one ever interacts with the chairs - it obviously varies from program to program, but our department chair is clinical faculty who frequently works with the residents so that's a common LOR for us to have. I don't know how it looks on the program side of things, if it shows up differently compared to the other LOR other than marking it as a chair letter)