What I was looking for: Rigorous training, good C/L services (even if there's no fellowship), great therapy training (including psychodynamic) baked into the curriculum, big city, warm > cold, access to mountains/trails/beaches > concrete jungle, ethnically and economically diverse patient and city population
1. BCM - Everything about the program and city screamed diversity. I felt like I fit into the program and city really well. Excellent therapy training, up there with Longwood and ?UCSF on my list. Weather is alright, no geography to speak of unfortunately, and no PM fellowship.
2. UCSF - Great faculty, didn't fit w/ the residents well, and found myself liking the prestige and weather/geography more than the city itself or training aspects of the program. Too much county.
3. Longwood - Great CL, down to earth residents, excellent therapy. Boston isn't one of my favorite cities.
4. UPMC - Would have to go out of the way for good therapy training, disliked that everything was in one building, patients not diverse enough ethnically or socioeconomically. Otherwise, great place.
5.UTSW - Has a lot of what I'm seeking but too laid back for me, and I couldn't do 4 years in Dallas
6. Emory - Therapy seemed underemphasized here, PGY1/2 weren't the happpiest.
7. Vanderbilt - see my reviews
8. Duke - see my reviews
9. UT Houston - Didn't click with anyone, disliked the training sites...I like the city of Houston, I don't like Houston that much.
10. UT Austin - see my reviews
My trail turned out to be a lot of similar programs in cities I would like to live (ATL, Austin, Nashville) but maybe not places I wanted to train because they seemed deficient in some way or another. In retrospect I would probably have done an away rotation somewhere in CA because to give myself a better idea of if I want to live on the West Coast and I would have tried to schedule some of my safety interviews (UT Houston, Austin, Duke) for later because they wound up bumping Michigan and Cornell into January, at which point I was totally burned out and cancelled both of them. Advice to future applicants: DO NOT schedule all of your interviews for the earliest possible dates, try to push safeties later into the cycle to keep open dates for your top programs.
ROL rationale: It really came down to where I thought I'd be happiest and get the most diverse clinical training possible while still preparing me to match at a PM fellowship. I grew up on East Coast, went to college in Houston, and stayed in the south for medschool. Being single and young, UCSF was my #1 choice after interview day but over time I realized I was making too many compromises on things that were important to me (quality of life, saving for retirement, distance from friends/family, etc.) to live in SF as a resident. I love Northern California, the weather, scenery, and outdoorsy stuff is leagues better than Houston, but I'm excited that I could be returning to Houston for 4 more years. I know that if I match at BCM I'm going to make it much harder for me to crack the CA job market if I ever want to move out West.
I was really hung up on UCSF because of its reputation, but when writing down all of my goals for residency and beyond, working in the southeast as a C/L clinician educator was much higher up than having an academic research career. I still ranked UCSF and Longwood over the other southern programs because the latter all seemed to be missing something important and I think I'd have been unhappy choosing a desirable city over a robust program. The only exception was probably UTSW, which I could have put over UPMC had I liked Dallas more than PGH.
The biggest concern I have if I match at BCM is the lack of a PM fellowship there. Since I never wanted to stay at my residency institution for fellowship and the PDs put me in touch with current CL faculty and recent grads that pursued fellowship, I felt pretty reassured. SDN keeps telling me PM fellowships aren't that competitive anyway.
