Anybody out there have personal experience with any of the following progams? Known anything about their competitiveness, quality of training and overall happiness of residents?

Brown
NEMC
BU
Lahey Clinic
Yale
U. Penn
Temple
Jefferson
Drexel
U. Maryland
U. Washington
OHSU

I'm not really interested in hearing how these programs rank according to US News or some random PD, or debating if Yale is better than UCSF (there are plenty of other threads for that). Hearing what people know from reliable sources or have experienced first hand would be far more useful.
Thanks.

I go to the University of Maryland so I can offer some direct feedback on that. Overall, the residents seem pretty happy with our program as the program director and chairperson of medicine are both friendly people. They stick with the 80 hr work week, and they have a nightfloat system to cover for people, so the work load is not unmanageable. Maryland residents rotate through three major hospitals, here, Mercy, and the VA, so you get to learn how different hospitals work. I don't know how competetive it is to get into Maryland, but I imagine that it is around average in competetiveness compared to most university internal medicine programs. The biggest disadvantage about our program that i have heard is the area (baltimore city is not a very good city to live in, it's fairly expensive, plus you have one of the highest crime rates in the nation), and the patient population (we take care of a lot of drug abusers, and that can be frustrating. Besides them asking the nurse to page you every 10 minutes for more pain medication, a lot of them don't take care of themselves so follow up care is poor, and you can get a little jaded after working here too long with all of these patients lying about things just to get you to do things for them). Those are some of the complaints of residents who trained at other schools said about my school anyways, I've never known any different, so I don't have anything to compare it to. I will probably be ranking Maryland as one of my top choices though, if that says anything about how much I like it here.

The biggest disadvantage about our program that i have heard is the area (baltimore city is not a very good city to live in, it's fairly expensive, plus you have one of the highest crime rates in the nation),

cost of living is a pretty relative thing. I own a nice (not huge but nice) home here in a safe, quiet neighborhood right in town. It cost me about 60K. The same house in the DC area would be about 300K. In Rochester NY where my sister lives, it would be about 30K. So it really depends where you're coming from, whether you would consider it expensive to live here.

personally, I love Baltimore, and it's been home to me for 12 years. I always scratch my head when people post things like "Baltimore's a pit...." but hey, I figure that means one more space at UMd available for me. :) To each his own.

bump

anybody else with info on these programs?