Framing the Psych Residency Companion Curriculum
The Psychiatry Residency Companion Curriculum is not designed to replace any part of an accredited psychiatric residency program. Instead, it exists as a high-yield supplement—curated with care and clinical relevance—to support residents in their journey through training. Grounded in the real-world constraints and cognitive demands of clinical practice, it offers residents a way to engage with foundational and advanced psychiatric topics through structured podcast episodes, AI-generated quizzes, and streamlined note-taking tools.
Many residents find themselves overwhelmed by the volume of reading and limited by the variability in local teaching resources. This project provides an alternative entry point to high-yield content—available while driving, cooking, or decompressing. It seeks to empower learners with flexible, mobile learning tools that don't sacrifice academic rigor. The curriculum leverages trusted podcast sources and aligns each episode with core ACGME/ABPN competencies, ensuring relevance to national standards in psychiatric education.
Critically, the Companion Curriculum emphasizes lifelong learning and learner autonomy. It encourages self-reflection and deeper exploration through embedded resources, further reading suggestions, and topic tagging. It is intended to augment—not supplant—traditional didactics, supervision, and clinical immersion. In fact, many of the episodes serve to reinforce what trainees have already seen in practice or prepare them for upcoming challenges on the wards, in clinic, or in consultation-liaison roles.
The project began as a grassroots effort to solve a local organizational challenge and grew into something broader: a tool to help residents in all types of programs, including those with fewer resources or greater faculty turnover. As psychiatry increasingly embraces digital tools and podcast-based education, the Companion Curriculum provides a structured, thoughtful framework to help residents learn smarter, not just harder.
How to Take Smart Notes
Ahrens, S. (2017). *How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers* (2nd ed.). CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
This book is a primary inspiration for the Smart Notes feature within this application, emphasizing atomic, linked notes for enhanced learning and knowledge synthesis.
Disclaimer
The Psych Residency Companion is an independent educational resource created for psychiatry trainees and clinicians. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any podcast creators, hosts, or production companies referenced herein.
All podcast links included in this project point to publicly available episodes hosted on official platforms (e.g., Apple Podcasts, Spotify). We do not host, redistribute, or alter original audio content.
Episode notes, summaries, quiz content, and educational commentary are original contributions produced under a commitment to open access psychiatry education. They are intended for non-commercial, academic, and personal use only.
Licensing
Unless otherwise noted, all original content in this project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). View license →
This means you are free to:
- Share – copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt – remix, transform, and build upon the material
Under the following terms:
- Attribution – You must give appropriate credit
- NonCommercial – You may not use the material for commercial purposes
- ShareAlike – If you remix or build upon the material, you must license your new creations under the same terms
Contact Regarding Content
If you are a podcast creator and have questions or concerns about the way your content is referenced, please contact us at: psychresidencycompanion@gmail.com.