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. Its easy to get FAs and OCTs 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 well hear forever telling us how to do things the right way. Hes also one of the funniest people youll 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 Childrens 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. Its 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. PGY2s 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 Emorys main hospital and Egleston (the childrens 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 arent 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 its 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, theyd be perfectly well-prepared to do so.
As far as one of the above posts referencing someones 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. Its obvious to anyone who spends anytime with us.
No one asked me or (paid me) to write this review, Im 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.