Harvard Longwood- House of God and The Brigham
Again, I'm not going into too many nitty gritty details here and I wouldnt even call this a review seeing as a previous poster seemed to cover most everything. But Ill post my impressions which can sorta show how random stuff impacts how applicants view programs, Im sure the same happens in reverse as well.
Overall, beforehand this was a program I was expecting to be kind of blown away by given the combo of harvard and big name hospitals. First impression is slightly mindblowing if you have never been to the Longwood medical area, in like 5 minutes you walk past the BMS, Brigham and Women's, Dana Farber, Boston Childrens and Beth Israel Deaconess. Unfortunately my initial contact with longwood residents set the tone in my mind and might have colored how I saw the rest of the program.
Either an intern or second year was talking to some other applicant about the medicine rotations and they said. "Medicine can be tough, but they are flexible enough to make it not so bad. For example, when I was on night-float at NW they just let me sleep in the call rooms during the day for the whole rotation so I wouldn't lose all that time commuting" That pretty much exploded my mind on so many levels and who knows, it might not even have been true, but definitely set the stage for how I saw the program as whole. In the same vein, the PD mentioned early in her overview "We used to let people rank medicine rotations, but everyone wanted the same one and would make people unhappy to not get what they want so now we randomly assign them". Left me thinking, dang you know maybe you could just pull the residents out of the rotation nobody wants year after year? Additionally it seemed like some of the residents might have been prepped to advise applicants not to worry too much about intern year when considering programs because intern year is pretty much the same everywhere. (This is just my complete conjecture based on having two eerily similar conversations with 2 different residents, maybe was just luck). Several residents mentioned call schedule being rather grueling at the program compared to others, which I think applicants are letting slide less and less these days so may start hurting their recruitment at some point.
On more positive notes, having these institutions and people as a learning environment makes for an incredible place to learn to become a psychiatrist. The CL experience may be as good as it gets anywhere in the country. The Chief of psychiatry took the time to meet each applicant and seemed extremely excited about psychiatry and the program. Definitely a highlight meeting him compared to the PD who seemed much more the blank slate analyst type and asked about my childhood as first question during interview! WTF? My childhood was basically puppies and rainbows so was a softball question for me, but seems like a strange topic to bring up in a professional job interview???
I also interviewed with Dr Gutheil which was really cool and a testament to the program to have someone like him taking time to interview applicants.
I don't remember many more details than that without consulting the folder of papers they gave me.
This whole review is probably riddled with inaccuracies based almost entirely on a change in mindset caused by a 10 second conversation, this is a strange process isn't it?
Overall Impression: Too much of a good thing
Again, I'm not going into too many nitty gritty details here and I wouldnt even call this a review seeing as a previous poster seemed to cover most everything. But Ill post my impressions which can sorta show how random stuff impacts how applicants view programs, Im sure the same happens in reverse as well.
Overall, beforehand this was a program I was expecting to be kind of blown away by given the combo of harvard and big name hospitals. First impression is slightly mindblowing if you have never been to the Longwood medical area, in like 5 minutes you walk past the BMS, Brigham and Women's, Dana Farber, Boston Childrens and Beth Israel Deaconess. Unfortunately my initial contact with longwood residents set the tone in my mind and might have colored how I saw the rest of the program.
Either an intern or second year was talking to some other applicant about the medicine rotations and they said. "Medicine can be tough, but they are flexible enough to make it not so bad. For example, when I was on night-float at NW they just let me sleep in the call rooms during the day for the whole rotation so I wouldn't lose all that time commuting" That pretty much exploded my mind on so many levels and who knows, it might not even have been true, but definitely set the stage for how I saw the program as whole. In the same vein, the PD mentioned early in her overview "We used to let people rank medicine rotations, but everyone wanted the same one and would make people unhappy to not get what they want so now we randomly assign them". Left me thinking, dang you know maybe you could just pull the residents out of the rotation nobody wants year after year? Additionally it seemed like some of the residents might have been prepped to advise applicants not to worry too much about intern year when considering programs because intern year is pretty much the same everywhere. (This is just my complete conjecture based on having two eerily similar conversations with 2 different residents, maybe was just luck). Several residents mentioned call schedule being rather grueling at the program compared to others, which I think applicants are letting slide less and less these days so may start hurting their recruitment at some point.
On more positive notes, having these institutions and people as a learning environment makes for an incredible place to learn to become a psychiatrist. The CL experience may be as good as it gets anywhere in the country. The Chief of psychiatry took the time to meet each applicant and seemed extremely excited about psychiatry and the program. Definitely a highlight meeting him compared to the PD who seemed much more the blank slate analyst type and asked about my childhood as first question during interview! WTF? My childhood was basically puppies and rainbows so was a softball question for me, but seems like a strange topic to bring up in a professional job interview???
I also interviewed with Dr Gutheil which was really cool and a testament to the program to have someone like him taking time to interview applicants.
I don't remember many more details than that without consulting the folder of papers they gave me.
This whole review is probably riddled with inaccuracies based almost entirely on a change in mindset caused by a 10 second conversation, this is a strange process isn't it?
Overall Impression: Too much of a good thing