Maryland/D.C. Programs Rank?

I interviewed all these places also. I really liked GW and Georgetown! Both probably lag behind on the prestige factor as compared to Hopkins or Maryland, but that's just me. GW and Georgetown are both at the top of my list. I am having difficulty ranking which comes first. I would love to hear your thoughts on the two.

honestly I ranked georgetown first because it seemed the most fun and they matched well in all their specialties. Md was a great place to but crappy town, didnt do hopkins bayview, GW was nice but felt I clicked better at georgetown. if it was solely how well known id go with Md. but DC is so much more fun

I interviewed at both Georgetown and Hopkins Bayview. I considered but rejected GW and Maryland as options.

Hopkins Bayview is, as the voting suggests, a MUCH stronger program than Georgetown.

Bayview has the informal name "Hopkins with a heart". The faculty, staff and residents were the most personable and friendly that I met on the interview trail. The residency program is well structured with tracks to suit all from the hard-core researcher to the the hospitalist, general internal medicine clinic doc or future subspecialist. The faculty are 100% Hopkins faculty and the housestaff from Hopkins Hospital rotate through the ICUs in their 2nd and 3rd years. The Medical School Academic Departments are split between the two campuses (Hopkins hospital downtown and Hopkins Bayview) except for Allergy, Rheum and Geriatrics which are almost all based at Bayview.

The Match list, for a small program, is unbelievable:

http://www.hopkinsbayview.org/medicine/residency/lifeafterresidency.html

Bayview is one of the best kept secrets in Internal Medicine. It has a faculty and match list that places it in the elite 1-2% of programs in the US but is small (and unknown) enough that it still reads ALL applications by hand.

In contrast, I got the impression, while the medical residency director is a hero and will have revived the program in 5-10yrs, that Georgetown wasn't what it was 20 or 30 years ago. The facility itself was shabby. The residents seemed "okay" but not super-happy. My faculty interviewer at Georgetown commented on how she thought the resident quality there was "patchy" and not as strong as in decades before. I'm not sure if that is true but the fact an interviewer would even think to mention that left me with a bad feeling.

Georgetown is undoubtedly the 3rd best program in the DC-Balt area (and is sure to get stronger with their awesome residency director) but can't compete with Hopkins and Hopkins Bayview:

Johns Hopkins > Hopkins Bayview >>> Georgetown > GW = Maryland > Others (WHC, FSH, Good Sam, Sinai).

have to agree with ganong's description of hopkins bayview. very friendly, personable faculty, that actually reads applications closely (my interview invitation was a personal email), great fellowship placement, and great GIM and ambulatory curriculum.

i liked GW > Georgetown for its access to the school of public health, nice hospital, and interesting primary care curriculum, but would guess that they're about equal overall.

georgetown appears to have better fellowship placement than GW and more reserach opportunities

I think the above 2 posts are both true. I get the impression that Georgetown and GWU are fairly comparable, but felt like Georgetown tries to be more academic (but would be a harder residency also).

My impression is that GWU is likelier a bit more cushy (newer hospital, use of PDA's, probably more warm and fuzzy vs. Georgetown) and more public health+primary care oriented, while Georgetown is more researchy and more of a place to go if you want to get a fellowship in a more competitive field like GI or cards.

Loved Bayview! Maryland a bit less so. As posters stated, JHU/Bayview is a very personable program, with great training nevertheless. I think the size of the program and the fact that all the faculty is JHU Medicine appointed gives a trainee a plethora of mentoring options that ultimately will result in excellent career placements (whether going into fellowship or into practice).
Maryland also has wonderful faculty but due to the size of the program and structure of the day one doesn't get to interact with many of them. Actually, I'd have preferred to have been interviewed by more than one faculty member. As for the training goes, it's definitely not cushy. Rotating in an amazing VA is a great asset to an already strong program.

I interviewed at those hospitals 3 years ago for IM.

At that time my ranking would be U of MD > Georgetown > Bayview > GW.

All of the above programs provide strong training, great faculty/research, and fellowships opportunities.

I do agree that the personal invitation email that Bayview sent was a very nice touch. The Associate PD wrote the email; she was cool and down-to-earth nice. Weird thing was that I did not have the chance to speak with the PD himself (was not interviewed by him).

GW is a hip program (nice location by the White House).

I have warm fuzzy feeling when thinking about Baltimore: inner harbor, Chesapeake crabs paired with cold Amstel light or Sam Adams, and the $10 per person sushi/korean bbq buffet

You don't have to live in downtown Baltimore (by the MLK); you can live in Columbia, Towson, White Marsh, etc where it is affordable nice, and safe. Don't live by MLK or Brooklyn/ Glen Burnie though.

Anyway, I matched to a program in a really cold place (although I love my program; my PD is so awesome and very supportive to all the residents in our program). Weird to say that I miss Baltimore, its massive potholes everywhere, and the mild winters.

I'm late in replying, but I'd rank them Maryland > Georgetown > Bayview > GW. I think GW is a small program with less academic rigor than the others. Bayview has the Hopkins affiliation and faculty and does well with fellowship outcomes, but I think they're overrated in this forum; they're still a community program at a small hospital. Georgetown has a strong reputation but financial woes and ties to Medstar Health, privatizing some of their approach. I've heard some nightmare stories from applicants who interviewed there. Maryland's a balanced program--not top-tier, but with strong clinical and academic reputation. The med school has a lot of research (#18 in research dollars nationwide). Their residents do well in the fellowship match too. I'm interested in a hospitalist job though, and they have a great inpatient training program, so I ranked them highly.

Yeah, Baltimore's kinda scary, but I'm thinking about living in Howard County or Towson if I match there. Good luck everyone! Match Day in 36 hours!!

feena527 said:

Bayview is in the lead and I was wondering if there are any particular reasons? Also what are the thoughts on university of maryland?

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I thought the program director was great. The program, while rigorous (3-4 ICU months intern year), does not seem malignant in the least. They are really interested in your mental health during residency.

The fellowship match looks just like the elite programs inn the country.

mecmd said:

I'm late in replying, but I'd rank them Maryland > Georgetown > Bayview > GW. I think GW is a small program with less academic rigor than the others. Bayview has the Hopkins affiliation and faculty and does well with fellowship outcomes, but I think they're overrated in this forum; they're still a community program at a small hospital. Georgetown has a strong reputation but financial woes and ties to Medstar Health, privatizing some of their approach. I've heard some nightmare stories from applicants who interviewed there. Maryland's a balanced program--not top-tier, but with strong clinical and academic reputation. The med school has a lot of research (#18 in research dollars nationwide). Their residents do well in the fellowship match too. I'm interested in a hospitalist job though, and they have a great inpatient training program, so I ranked them highly.

Yeah, Baltimore's kinda scary, but I'm thinking about living in Howard County or Towson if I match there. Good luck everyone! Match Day in 36 hours!!

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I agree that I really liked Maryland. I liked the PD, the program structure and the residents seemed strong. Their fellowship match was solid but not exceptional.

I felt like Bayview was stronger, at least for IM. It is part of the hopkins dept of internal medicine so your teachers are all hopkins faculty. Both have rigorous training but the added benefit of being able to do research and rotations at hopkins hospital is big. Add to that the fact that their fellowship match is exceptionally strong and it is hard to argue with the strength of bayview. Both UMD and Bayview have a 97% ABIM pass rate.

In terms of Bayview being a small hospital, Georgetown has 600 beds, Bayview has 560 beds, GWU hospital 370 beds. That said, the only one reservation I had about bayview was that i was worried you would only be exposed to the kinds of things you would see in a community hospital.

I don't think your training will be poor at any of these programs. Good luck tomorrow everyone!

dragonfly99 said:

I think the above 2 posts are both true. I get the impression that Georgetown and GWU are fairly comparable, but felt like Georgetown tries to be more academic (but would be a harder residency also).

My impression is that GWU is likelier a bit more cushy (newer hospital, use of PDA's, probably more warm and fuzzy vs. Georgetown) and more public health+primary care oriented, while Georgetown is more researchy and more of a place to go if you want to get a fellowship in a more competitive field like GI or cards.

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I just interviewed at GWU. Overall I really enjoyed my time there. Fellowship match was 17/28 residents. Over the past years they've only had one resident who wanted to do a fellowship and didn't match and it was because she decided on GI the last minute (this is according to a chief resident over lunch so take it with a grain of salt). However GWU did just get a new PD and she's implementing the 4+1 system next year and has a bunch of other innovative ideas. A very energetic and approachable person.
One downside (or plus side for some) is that the surgery service, ob/gyn and neuro share the same ICU with IM and the teams consist of attendings/residents/interns from all these services. IE. as a medicine intern you can have a surgery resident and a neurology attending on your team during your ICU rotation. It's always been that way and I haven't heard too much complaints from the residents. They share INOVA Fairfax with Georgetown and actually mingle with them, so you can have a resident from GWU with interns from Georgetown. One additional piece of info is that during wards each team actually has two residents and two interns with a cap of 20 patients.

I felt the need to reply to this, as I'm a current UMD resident and some of the above info, while useful, is a bit dated.

If I were to rank it, I agree that I'd still rank Maryland > Bayview > Gtown > GW. I actually have absolutely nothing against Bayview--in fact, I loved it, and it might actually have made obtaining fellowship of choice easier, but I don't think by much - my choice was more b/c of the size of the program and because I wanted a less community focus. At MD we have a reasonably successful fellowship match in pretty much all competitive fields (cardiology, GI, heme/onc) and have very strong pulm/crit care, cardiology, and oncology in-house programs in particular. We've tended for the past few years to have a bit of a skew towards some specialties (infectious disease, cardiology, pulm/cc, just cc come to mind) but we have an increasing number of people interested in and matching into GI and oncology. This next week should certainly be interesting since we will find out the results of the fellowship match.

In response to the program being rigorous... it absolutely is a fairly rigorous program, but so are a lot of academic inner-city programs; Hopkins is if anything a lot more insanely tough on its residents and has a reputation for being even more "rigorous' as above (although I'd argue that the actual training is probably similar at both programs). However, it's rigorous in the setting of a very supportive faculty and fellow residents; our PD has been at the job for a couple decades and is very well known around the country, particularly on the east coast (I've heard her name dropped at a couple other programs on interviews) so her word means a lot. We have a lot of great teaching faculty both in general medicine and subspecialty, and decent research opportunities in pretty much every subspecialty (as well as general medicine, of course). The number of ICU months tbh varies depending on the intern... I know some folks who are doing 3-4 of them, but that includes our CCU, MICU, and VA micu/ccu services, which are all differing levels of acuity. I think one of the biggest strengths of our program is our MICU actually - we get some truly insanely sick people and some fairly rare cases.

On a side note, one of the other strengths is that we have a combined EM/IM program, for those interested; MD is known for having probably one of the best EM programs in the country as well in no small part thanks to the STC. Please feel free to PM me with questions and good luck to those interviewing this year!

My1021 said:

I just interviewed at GWU. Overall I really enjoyed my time there. Fellowship match was 17/28 residents. Over the past years they've only had one resident who wanted to do a fellowship and didn't match and it was because she decided on GI the last minute (this is according to a chief resident over lunch so take it with a grain of salt). However GWU did just get a new PD and she's implementing the 4+1 system next year and has a bunch of other innovative ideas. A very energetic and approachable person.
One downside (or plus side for some) is that the surgery service, ob/gyn and neuro share the same ICU with IM and the teams consist of attendings/residents/interns from all these services. IE. as a medicine intern you can have a surgery resident and a neurology attending on your team during your ICU rotation. It's always been that way and I haven't heard too much complaints from the residents. They share INOVA Fairfax with Georgetown and actually mingle with them, so you can have a resident from GWU with interns from Georgetown. One additional piece of info is that during wards each team actually has two residents and two interns with a cap of 20 patients.

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I actually don't think there's much difference in the "exposure" you get from either GWU or Gtown; Gtown has a better name because... well, it's Georgetown. The clinical experience probably doesn't differ that much between them IMO. DC is certainly a nicer city to live in than Baltimore, but as people have mentioned, there are both nice places IN Baltimore to live in (Harbor East, Fells, Canton, Mt Vernon, the Harbor) and around Baltimore (White Marsh, Towson, Annapolis, Columbia) and there's a number of residents I know who commute from closer to DC b/c of their spouses/SOs.

I thought the faculty and residents at both places were very warm and supportive either way at GW/gtown. Sometimes you just have to go with your gut in these circumstances.

Bumping this thread.

Anyone have any updates (I think PDs have changed at some of these programs)? I'm also curious about Inova vs. GWU. If anyone is able to compare/contrast I would much appreciate it!