Does it matter where you do your psychiatry residency

[postbacpremed87]

It seems like most job set ups and offers in outpatient/inpatient are pretty homogeneous. 200-250k for 40-50hrs a week. Does it truly matter where you go to residency (other than personal fit)?

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[chicagochildpsych]

I think it depends if it is university training if you want to work in a major metro (a coveted fellowship means more), high powered program if you want a high end academic career (which is what I wanted until I interacted with people from academia)

 

[serimeri]

I think it depends if it is university training if you want to work in a major metro (a coveted fellowship means more), high powered program if you want a high end academic career (which is what I wanted until I interacted with people from academia)

OMG I totally agree with you. I feel like a community progam is more of a friendly feel and not as fast paced in my opinion.

 

[nitemagi]

Simply, medicine is still very much an apprenticeship-based model. Yet we can learn to be adult learners and think for ourselves.

So it's useful to be around high quality clinicians to learn from, and to be exposed to a wide variety of clinical populations and approaches. Otherwise you end up generalizing from a narrow experience-set. That applies to both academia and community. Therapy and med approaches.

 

[Leo Aquarius]

OMG I totally agree with you. I feel like a community progam is more of a friendly feel and not as fast paced in my opinion.

My experience with community programs rings true to what you say. The other benefit is you're gonna see pretty severe cases at these programs and the attendings will depend on you more to treat them then at a super major university program where attendings face (or put on themselves) more pressure.

 

[splik]

personally i think it is best to get as much exposure to different systems of care as possible as this will give you different patients, and a sense of how different systems work or don't work, as well as where you want to work and helps with your employability. For example I have worked at the university, county, VA and State Hospitals, and will also work in a community mental health center, and a private practice next year. The only other major systems I won't have experienced are the Jail, Prison, and a managed care system like Kaiser, but I'm going into forensics so will get exposure to the former 2 anyway.

 

[VMSmith]

It depends what you want to do after your training.

If your goal is to make 200-250k per year working 40-50 hrs per week and don't care where you end up living, then no, it doesn't matter where you do your residency.

 

[notdeadyet]

The other benefit is you're gonna see pretty severe cases at these programs and the attendings will depend on you more to treat them then at a super major university program where attendings face (or put on themselves) more pressure.

You might be overestimating the coddling at super major university programs. Most of these that I'm familiar with are resident driven. The "super major" part typically means that many of the faculty have competing priorities and residents will have a lot of autonomy and be depended on to deliver care.

If you choose an academic program that has its own county hospital as a training site (which many do), you'll get many of the benefits of a community program combined with the benefits of training at a big academic institution (zebras, specialized training, etc.). I couldn't comment on the "friendly feel" of the community programs, but it jibes with my experience working in county environments. Makes sense.