I'm currently a pediatric neurology fellow at CNMC. I did my pediatric residency here, and was also a medical student at GW, so I spent most of my 4th year rotations here. I've seen a couple of these posts and I thought I should pass along some first-hand information about my own experiences here.
I cannot speak highly enough about the program at Children's National. From a clinical training perspective, the attendings here are top-notch in their fields, and are absolutely dedicated to teaching. Many of them have participated in the Master Teacher's program at GW, which is modeled after the Baylor program that essentially allows attendings to earn a teaching degree focused on adult learning and medical education. The attendings are approachable and the residents interact with them mostly on a first-name basis. These people have been my mentors since I was a medical student, and it should say something that I started my clinical rotations convinced that the one field I would not even consider would be pediatrics.
The attendings and residents are constantly looking for ways to do more teaching, and it means that the program is constantly improving. While I was a resident, small team-based didactics were usually being done after rounds, and would often be skipped if rounds ran long and residents had to get to noon conference. The solution was to formally move team-based didactics to before rounds. Rounds still ended at about the same time (because as you will find, clinical rounds can expand to fill whatever time is available), but for the second half of my intern year, formal didactics were done on the assigned mornings without fail. There is also very good clinical teaching on rounds and at the bedside. Formally, there is residency-wide case conference two mornings per week, Grand Rounds every Wednesday morning, and Professorial Rounds (think hospital-wide case conference) every Thursday at noon. Every day except Thursday, there is noon conference for all the peds residents from noon to 1pm, during which the chiefs hold all the pagers to protect that time for learning (another improvement instituted during my training).
This is by no means a malignant program, but the residents work very hard. We are a busy hospital - in addition to the unusual and esoteric stuff that will be referred to any children's hospital, we are the primary source of in-patient care for most of the pediatric patient's in the DC community, so you see a lot of the bread-and-butter pediatric cases as well. My experience, however, was that the residents always went out of their way to find out if anyone was overburdened and always stepped up to help each other out.
I never felt that the residents were "cliquish", but I can see how some people visiting the program may have gotten that impression. I think it is more a function of the fact that despite being a very large program (now almost 40 residents per year), it still feels very intimate. You know everyone you work with, and I consider all of the residents I trained with to be good friends, with whom I still keep in touch. Remember, residency is different than any job you may have had before. You are going to have a closer relationship with these people than you have ever had with a set of co-workers, and you will be relying on them for a lot of support. I think the closeness we all had with each other was a plus, but I can see how it might make us appear cliquish to visiting residents or students.
Anyways, I think this is a phenomenal hospital. It will train you to be an excellent general pediatrician, or prepare you to go into whatever sub-specialty you might be considering and be successful there as well. If you are at all interested in health policy or global health, you will have numerous opportunities to explore that while in this program as well.
I would be happy to answer any additional questions about the program as well if anyone wants to send my a message through SDN.
