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Podunk, USA.As someone from central IL, I find it annoying that people call a 250k metro a "small, rural city."
WTH do I call my 3000 person town I grew up in then?
Location irrelevant? They are pretty equal. Probably people would rank them 1. UC-Davis 2. U of Minn 3. UI Peoria 4. UC Irvine 5. Colorado if you are talking just program strength. That being said, I'm personally high on Peoria because they have great fellowships (IR especially) but they are relatively unknown outside of rads. I also don't like California so there's that. haha
Peoria only had an IR fellowship (seemed to be a really strong program) when I interviewed there. Impressive residents though a small class. Thought the PD was really good and was a big resident advocate. I would say OP needs to give more info on location-Peoria, California, and Denver are a huge range of different lifestyles.
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Thanks for the replies, guys.
I say location is irrelevant because though I'd really like to end up in California for residency and practice (and therefore my rank list as is will probably be in the order I posted, maybe swapping #2 and #3), for the purposes of this post I also want to objectively consider going to the program with the best training.
If any of those 5 offers substantially better training, I would be OK with sacrificing my desire to go to California.
If you wanna end up in California, go to residency in California. All those programs will offer you the same level of solid training.
I agree with the last poster. If you want to end up in California (tough market to break into), you are best off doing as much of your training (resident and fellowship) there as possible.
Sounds like what all my advisors are saying too. Location above most else.
As a native Californian who was exiled for med school (and now for rads) who matched last year I would rank them like this:
1. UCI/UCD
2.UCI/UCD
3. University of Colorado
4. University of Minnesota
5. UI-Peoria
Location and culture are huge. I don't see any huge advantages any of these programs have over another in terms of reputation. Personally I don't see how you can have UIPeoria in your top 5. The location, weather, culture is literally a 180 degree turn from a UCI for example. I would rank all California programs that you got interviews at at the top. I'm assuming if you got a UCI interview then you at least got a couple more CA community program interviews?
I turned down a Univ Colorado interview because of comments I've heard multiple times on the interview trail which are highlighted on the forums in the review thread.
My friend is a resident at Peoria. He told me if he were to do it again, he would absolutely not have ranked it based on location, sparse didactics, lack of support and respect for residents, and the frequency of call. Unfortunately he did not have too many options. Just my 2 cents.
http://peoria.medicine.uic.edu/departments___programs/GME/residencies/radiology/residents/