Emory University

I could not have been more impressed by Emory when interviewing at thier program. The residents were the most enthusiastic group that I met on the trail who all were loving their training, the balanced exposure, and the interactions with the faculty. The common report is that this is a busy program and that residents will get maximum exposure so that when finishing residency, you will graduate confident and comfortable with anything that walks through your door. You will be well prepared for comp. ophthalmology or to match in any fellowship.

Strengths of the program included diversity of training. Grady is very high volume, and because it serves many of the uninsured, you see very advanced pathology and get considerable autonomy as a resident. The resources in the Grady eye clinic were good and the support staff is good, and the teaching there is amazing. This hospital produces a lot of trauma call. Additionally, there is a huge VA in town, and that runs like a VA with all the advantages of large operative experience. The residents say the VA clinic is good preparation for a future in private practice - bread and butter stuff seen efficiently. Then there is Emory Univ Hosp which is more the academic practice setting. So this program includes all training settings you could want in one city. Surgical numbers are high, well-balanced, and include extra-cap cataracts and refractive surgery. A senior resident told me that a unique aspect of the surgical training is that residents are trained to correct their own mistakes and that you do not switch chairs with the attending in the OR if you do something wrong, rather attendings talk you through it and reach over when needed.

The faculty were personable and impressive people. Residents stated that they are great teachers and are easy to work with. There are didactic sessions on Friday mornings. Research opportunities were plentiful, but were not forced upon you. You are expected to read the text books, but the focus of this program is on getting pt care experience and seeing and doing as much as possible, and the test scores are resulting very high.

A prominant faculty member at Wash U stated that Emory was one of the best 4 programs for residency training - known for great training with happy residents. Every senior resident I talked to got interviews at every fellowship they applied to, and they applied to top notch programs. No one said anything negative. Many saw staying in Atlanta for fellowship as an attractive option. I think it says a lot that of the 6 who matched in the 2008 match, half are from Emory which means that they knew the program very well and wanted to stay there.

Being the only training program in a city of 4 million gives residents a lot of patients. Living in Atlanta was popular with everyone, and surprisingly, if you live in one of the nice neighborhoods that are between downtown and Decatur, you can drive in to work in about 15 minutes and will be located inbetween the hospitals you'll work in.

I agree with the above post. As a former med student, I know that the residents are really happy with their training at Emory. The program director is down to earth and gives full support for the residents. The eye clinics are always busy and residents gets lots autonomy esp at Grady. There is enough surgeries for all six residents. The residents gets their choice of fellowhip. the class that graduated 2007, corena - emory, retina - emory, retina - Wash U, peds- UCLA, oculoplastic - duke. Would of loved to stay at Emory, but had to leave atlanta because of the Mrs.
Atlanta is a great city for young professionals to live in. affordable and diverse.

As a first year resident at Emory, I wanted to chime in on this blog. I agree with most of the above postings. I truly believe that residents at Emory do get a lot of exposure to wide variety of pathology and patients, and we are trained to be very autonomous from the get go. That said, our second years and third years are always available for questions and assistance.

Positives:

Volume: both at grady and va, we see about 70-90 pts daily in clinic as a group; as first years, we get to do lots of YAG capsulotomies, intravitreal Avastin and foscarnet injections, chalazion removals, LIs, and ALTs [2nd half of first year]. As first years, we also get to do the enucleations[avg 2-3 per resident per year]

Variety of cases: on a given day at Grady clinic, you just don't know what is going to walk through your doors. We have a ton of immigrants from Central/South America, and Africa that show up at our clinic doors or the ER. As the primary call person at Grady from day 1 [July 1st], we as first years get to start the work up and think about the patient before calling in our 3rd year back up resident. Unfortunately, because our patients are so poor in most cases, the pathology is advanced by the time we see them--> lot of PDR, lots of HIV associated CMV retinitis, occassional ARN/PORN, endophthalmitis, Toxo etc, and of course Trauma galore...
We also cover grady in patient consult as first years [while working the clinic at the same time, ie. it is not a separate rotation to be just on consult like other programs] and get really interesting ID consults as well as neuroop things.

Autonomy: it is graduated designation of responsibility. By 2nd year, you are the leader of the Grady clinic. You run the show which is a lot of stress but comes with a lot of rewards when you finish the day and know that nothing can really shake you up.

Four totally different hospitals--> Grady for the indigent care, VA hospital [the Atlanta VA eye clinic works like a private clinic with state of the art of equipment and amazing techs], Emory [mostly attendings run the clinic], and Crawford long[a private hospital feel]

Faculty: we have a variety of top notch faculty in house. Residents will agree that having Dr. Broocker at Grady is an amazing asset to the program. He has been here for 20 years and is a gem for the program. At grady, we also now have couple of young faculty members that help with clinic which is great as well to have new energy and ideas. At the end of the day, the clinic is managed by the residents.


Negatives:

Volume: as much as i can rave about the amazing volume that we see, at the end of the day, it can get to you day in and day out. We don't finish most days at grady until 6:30 pm or so and there are couple of days a month that we stay in clinic until 8 or 8:30 pm and then you might be on call that same night. Having 6 residents per year helps as we get to split overnight call q6 [it's home call].

Call: weekend call can be hit or miss and mostly hits with Grady call esp. being brutal some weekends. it's very unpredictable but most of us expect a big chunk of our call weekends to be spent at Grady. that said, you learn a lot on call.

Grady: having a place like Grady is a + and a -. For all the pathology we see, the clinic does not run that efficiently because of the inherent systemic issues with the hospital system. It just takes a lot of time to get a patient through the system. You just have to be there to understand, but I still love working at Grady. Patients are really grateful for your time and work there but it can be frustrating. I am sure residents at other county programs can relate..

Overall, I made an excellent choice in ranking Emory high and matching here. I am sure I will be trained well and can pursue a good fellowship if I choose to or go into comprehensive. The camaraderie of the residents with each other is probably my favorite part of being here. On those long days at Grady, we never leave clinic until the last patient is seen and if someone is done early, they help out the rest of the residents. We leave the clinic together every day at Grady and the VA.

Based on my Dec. 2009 interview at Emory:

I was very impressed with Emory's program. Emory (along with Baylor, Doheny, and maybe 1-2 other programs) is one of the "harder working" programs in the nation. If you're looking for a relatively light load during residency, Emory is probably not the place for you. I don't think there's any doubt that the residents are very well prepared for just about anything eye-related following their Emory training.

The diversity of pathology and patient population is outstanding. One resident commented that the Grady experience can be like practing ophthalmology in the developing world in terms of the pathology/advanced disease and number of ethnicities that one sees.

The people (residents, faculty, chair, program director & coordinator) are incredibly nice; I don't think I encountered one unfriendly person during the interview day. I felt that the residents were genuinely enthusiastic about their program even though they work a bit harder than the average ophtho resident.

Most, if not all, residents had positive things to say about Atlanta.

I had no red flags and ranked this program very highly, i.e., in my top 3.

I was looking at scutwork.com about Emory and found some comments that weren't necessarily in line with what I have read on SDN. Would anyone care to support / refute this review by one PGY-2 (From 2007:

Grady - LOTS of menial leg-work that residents must do that do not contribute to our education, but there's no way around the system

Atmosphere - Cameraderie among peers is average at best. Much gossip and unpleasant personalities plague the program as it currently stands. The attending-resident relationships for the most part are good. The physical environment of the work area is fine. No complaints. There are no FMG's in the program. Having a life outside of work is generally discouraged, especially by the current program director. There are those of us who maintain quite a healthy life outside of the hospital, but we take a lot of garbage from above for choosing to live balanced lives.

Overall - The main drawback is the uncomfortable atmosphere amongst the different residency classes, but hopefully this is something that will change in the next year and few months. Most residents feel more than adequately prepared once finished. If I had to reapply, I would have applied more broadly and would have seriously considered going elsewhere if I had known what I now know.

2011 Update

The program is great. Residents work hard, see amazing pathology. Hours are long, clinic is busy, you end up doing more tedious work that is necessary, but the pay off is all the autonomy you want, but also all the help you want. The PD changed in recent years, but the new crew is excellent and they are really interested in resident education.

I would say surgical numbers are about average (or slightly higher) but nothing to brag about, and the transition into the OR is slower than some other places. But the clinic experience is really what makes Emory stand out. Once you finish here, you may not be well versed in dry eyes, but you will be very comfortable with toxoplasmosis, CMV and some of the worst PDR in the western world. I am not saying that kind of stuff is bread and buter ophthalmology, but after that, you feel pretty comfortable in the eye clinic, dealing with complex situations, and you can figure out dry eye on your own. The work ethic is strong and well-known and residents don't have any problem matching into the fellowships they want.

Any problems with camaradarie are forgoten history at this point, its not even worth refuting the above statements. The current resident classes are all great, all friends. In fact, I think this may be the biggest selling point of Emory. Come interview and you will see.

Now as a PGY-4 resident at Emory, I can share a first-hand perspective. I truly believe this is a fantastic program, and although there are many other good programs, I feel it would be hard to find a better one.

The strongest attribute is our faculty. They are great teachers, are dedicated to the residency program, are very supportive, and they allow us to have significant autonomy yet are always available to us for anything. All of our surgeries are supervised, and many of the attendings have been teaching residents to operate for decades and are very good at it. The balance between autonomy and supervision is about perfect here, having essentially resident-operated clinics at Grady and the VA, but plenty of support from attendings when needed.

Grady is probably our favorite, yet most challenging, part of the training. For good reason, this program is probably most famous for this huge and busy county hospital which sees very extreme pathology. It’s easy to get FA’s and OCT’s at Grady, we do many injections, and there are lots of inpatient hospital consults. There is all the expected trauma experience, lots of infectious disease (syphilis, TB, CMV and on and on) and uveitis, and a variety of great pathology to learn from. Our most beloved Dr. Broocker is full-time at Grady. He has dedicated much of his career to resident education and advocacy for underserved patients. No one has personally invested more into this or any other residency program than Dr. Broocker and he will always be that voice inside our heads that we’ll hear forever telling us how to do things the right way. He’s also one of the funniest people you’ll ever meet. There are two other awesome part-time attendings at Grady, and most of the Emory attendings staff the Grady clinic/OR on a rotating basis, so we have excellent teaching at Grady and a plethora of patients to take care of.

The VA is an extremely high volume clinic where residents learn to be efficient. On a typical day, 1 first year, 2 second years, and 1 third year will together see well over 100 patients (sometimes 70 just in the morning clinic). The tech and photography support is fantastic. We are lucky to have a large full time attending staff dedicated solely to the Atlanta VA including 3 glaucoma, 2 cornea, and 1 medical retina attendings – all of whom are always available. Other retina and oculoplastics faculty from Emory come to the VA on a weekly basis. The surgery schedule is fully booked months in advance, and the veterans are a wonderful group of people to get to serve.

Of course we spend a lot of time on rotations at Emory, the home-base. The clinics are currently being completely remodeled and will be state of the art and brand new in the next few months. It is a relatively large department (see the Emory website) and there are several people of national prominence in every subspecialty of ophthalmology working at Emory Eye Center. The faculty is so extensive and dedicated to education that there are fellowships in literally every subspecialty (including ocular oncology and ocular pathology). The eye department has a geneticist and several accomplished full-time researchers. The fellows compliment our education. They generate their surgical numbers at Emory, and we generate ours at Grady and the VA, with the exception of peds where we alternate surgery weeks with the peds fellow at the Children’s hospital. At Emory we work in an attendings clinic or OR and see very interesting and often very complicated tertiary care and referral patients. Some unique things are a world-renown ocular pathologist, Dr. Grossniklaus, who we work a lot with, Dr. Hubbard who has a relatively huge pediatric retina and retinoblastoma practice (very hard to find that), a famous neuro-ophthalmology department who literally wrote the text books, some of the most prominent pediatric cataract surgeons, the editor of the Journal of Refractive Surgery, Dr. Randleman, in the cornea department, Dr. Wojno in oculoplastics who recently published another textbook and seems to know pretty much everything in the field, a very busy glaucoma department with 4 attendings including two who do pediatric glaucoma, and a strong well rounded retina department with people who have expertise in inherited retinal dystrophies, ocular oncology, uveitis, and pediatric retina. It’s important to look for a large, well-rounded department like this, and it would be impossible to work with all these people and NOT learn a ton.

As residents, you can count on the support of your chairman, Dr. Olsen, who gets to know every resident personally, strongly promotes the program, and is an amazing leader who is also very kind and approachable. He is great to work with in clinic and the OR, supports many annual traditions like the new resident/fellow welcome party (at a bowling ally this year) and the annual residents day golf tournament. The residency program director is a graduate of the Emory program, is one of the most talented educators in the department, and can personally relate to what we are all going through. Dr. Pruett (Paul to all the residents) is investing himself into making this program even better, and so far he is doing a fantastic job. Terri Trotter is fully invested into being the program coordinator here, knows how to pull all the strings, and loves the residents like a mother would. So in general, the leadership of the residency program and department are second to none.

The surgical numbers are solid, and are also well rounded. Operating here is somewhat back-loaded with the vast majority happening during the 3rd year. That being said we get a wide variety of cases and are very busy operating our last year, which most of us love. PGY2’s do all the enucleations, and we get more than average planned extracap surgeries, which are usually done by a PGY3. We do a huge volume of retina lasers and innumerable intravitreal injections.

There is a new wetlab that is currently being revamped, and you can get as many pig eyes to practice on as you want.

First year call is the busiest because you cover Grady in addition to the VA and Emory Midtown. That being said, after a year of Grady call you feel like you can handle just about anything. Second year call is less busy – you cover Emory’s main hospital and Egleston (the children’s hospital), and you field phone calls from the “private” patients at Emory, but your consults are more complicated and sure to include more neuro-op and peds and less trauma than year 1. Third year call feels very light as you are just back-up to the first years who become competent really quickly.

Parking and traffic aren’t problems, and the salary is plenty to get by in Atlanta.

There is plenty of research to be done, depending on how interested you are in that, with many attendings happy to mentor you through projects (basic science or clinical).

When it’s time to apply for fellowships, our attendings really go to bat for us. Because Emory has a long-standing reputation for its quality of training, residents from here have no problem matching at the top fellowships in their subspecialty of choice. If someone wanted to go right into a comprehensive practice right after finishing, they’d be perfectly well-prepared to do so.

As far as one of the above posts referencing someone’s comments from several years ago about the atmosphere: The camaraderie in this program is great, and the relationship between the residents and our faculty is excellent. The atmosphere among the residency classes is that we are all good friends. It’s obvious to anyone who spends anytime with us.

No one asked me or (paid me) to write this review, I’m just really proud of all that Emory has to offer and think that any hard-worker looking for one of the best training programs in a place where they will still have fun and be treated well should look here.

Can anyone comment on the away rotation at Emory? How involved students can be, whether it appears to influence interview selection (positively), etc. Emory is a top choice, so I'll be applying for the away either way, but I'm curious to hear from anyone familiar with the program.

Prior to my interview I'd heard it said that Emory was possibly a malignant program. After my interview I can honestly say that I do not believe this to be the case. They work very hard and have some intense attendings, but I do not believe this is a malignant program.

I really enjoyed my interview day here. The interview questions were some of my favorites from any place on the trail. It was obvious that the interviewers had closely read my application beforehand and their questions were specific and well thought out. They seemed to be looking for people who work really hard, are team players, and have the potential to be excellent surgeons. I was asked repeatedly whether or not I thought I would have strong surgical skills. The program director (Dr. Aaron) has great energy and really set the tone for the day during the initial program presentation.

Haphazard notes from interview day: The eye floor at Grady is currently being remodeled. The residents are super busy, work VERY hard and don't have much time for studying or research. Grady clinic typically ends around 8pm. One resident told us that the only reason he has time for research is because he functions well on 4 hours of sleep. Atlanta traffic sucks and Grady is far from the main Emory hospital. The residents see TONS of unique and end-stage pathology. The residents become competent clinicians quickly because they are expected to see lots of patients. Next to Bascom this is one of the most autonomous programs at which I interviewed and one of the strongest clinical programs in the country. Residents begin injections at Grady on day 1 of residency. They are trying to push surgical experience into the first year. Still teach extracaps because they believe this is a valuable skill (I'd wager this is especially helpful for those with an interest in international work). Lots of good research opportunities, but like I mentioned it seems like there is limited time to take advantage of them. Top fellowship matches. Great reputation. Hot and muggy summers. World famous ocular pathologist. Fellows in every specialty. The residents were all very personable and humble. A surgical elective in the third year can be used in a variety of ways. Ms. Terri Trotter is hilarious and loving and kind of scary. You better not call her by her first name. I would have been happy to match here.

Surgery numbers: 180 cataracts, 18 strab, 62 plastics, residents actually DO some PPVs rather than just watching or assisting

Ignatius M.D. said:

Can anyone comment on the away rotation at Emory? How involved students can be, whether it appears to influence interview selection (positively), etc. Emory is a top choice, so I'll be applying for the away either way, but I'm curious to hear from anyone familiar with the program.

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Rotate at Grady for two weeks, VA the other two. Lots of time with residents, you get to see and work up your own patients. You are responsible for a presentation to some of the faculty at the end of the rotation. My stats were average and below what Emory typically interviews, but I was well liked during my time there and was invited back come December. Away rotations can be risky, and it seems especially so here. The majority of away rotators were not invited back. If you have a strong application and think you can secure an interview here without an away, I would probably recommend it. If you do end up going, work as hard as you can -- the residents there certainly do.