Malignant Programs?

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I hate the idea of perpetuating the 'rumor mill'; however, I feel that it is very important to get information that is important to applicants out there and available. That said, please reveal & discuss things that you have heard regarding anesthesiology programs that understand to be "malignant" or that you feel will have a difficult time meeting the new 2003 resident work hours restriction.

If you see a posting w/i this thread that you disagree with, please, by all means, express your counter viewpoint. Most of what we think we know about programs comes from professionally prepared brochures, web site and the 'rumor mill'. Maybe this will become a forum that we can use to reveal the true "self" of some programs out there.


From what I know:

Hopkins: particularly grueling call schedule for CA1 & CA2 years...have heard as intense as q2 day & 36 hours/pop for both years.

Mass Gen: essentially a similar story to Hopkins -- lots of call, excessive hours and not too much of the academics

All I have for now...please offer up your own feedback or observations.

As a current resident at MGH, I couldn't disagree with you more...

On a busy month we are on call 5 or 6 times, but the norm is 3 to 4 times per month - we are guaranteed 2 full free weekends, and often end up with 3 full weekends. When on call you work hard, but that is the whole point of being on call - to learn and get to do things you normally wouldn't have a chance to during the day hours.. not to sleep... and post-call we are sent home at 7am no matter how much we protest.

Q3 call only occurs during ICU months, but you are never on call on a friday (fellow takes that call) so you actually end up with a golden weekend (means no call friday to sunday)

Academics is very strong... An unbelievable amount of research goes on here - for heaven's sake at MGH we do spinal fluid cooling during AAA repairs, we created cisatracurium, the twitch monitor and the story goes on... The attendings are authors or editors or board examiners, and love to teach and always willing to do a totally different technique on a case by case basis... we have multiple lectures and journal clubs, but most of the teaching occurs where it should: next to very sick patients when crap hits the fan.

The attendings go on golf outings with residents (last week a group drove up to new hampshire i think), this coming weekend we are all going to be kayaking at the chairman's place on the cape... and the residents are all very cohesive, and when we get the chance we usually relax at the local pubs and bars after work - trading war stories

MGH is not a malignant program, and I truly feel that this rumor grew out of jealousies of other programs. In fact, what i noticed when i was interviewing three years ago was that a lot of programs would take crapshots at MGH, but during my interview at MGH nobody ever talked poorly about other programs - what does MGH need to prove? nothing...

And I have a friend at Johns Hopkins (we did our prelim medicine year together) and he is happy....

just to dispel a few "rumors"

Tenesma;

I definitely appreciate your reply to my post! As I said, you can never fully trust the pretty brochures, professionally done web site and the rumor mill. It is most excellent to learn about programs from folks who are actually there!

Regarding your information on MGH, it is certainly more than enough to prompt me to take yet another look at applying there...and potentially Hopkins as well. Maybe you could encourage your friend to provide some insight here on SDN about Hopkins as well.

It was not my intention to propagate rumors and was my hope to have them dispelled by people in the know. Again, thanks for taking the time to reply.

I would like to add my 2 cents on anesthesia programs. I will be a anesthesia resident at Hopkins next July and would agree with the above post regarding it being a malignant program. I had a good friend go through the program and after speaking with many residents, it sounds very similar to MGH (2-3 weekends off per month). The residents are all happy and find the workload to be very reasonable. I think most programs have happy residents (because most people doing anesthesia are chill and down to earth) but what differentiates top 10 from the rest is caseload, faculty, and residents. Remember that Hopkins is run by an anesthesiologist, and we are certainly not second class citizens. Interview at a lot of different places and you will see. Other great programs that may not be considered top 5, Emory and Michigan. UNC is not bad either. Hope this helps.