How important are faculty vs patient population?

[medimedimedi]

I'm having a hard time ranking between a couple of programs.

Program A has good faculty, great didactics, and really smart residents but I'm not digging the patient population. It's homogenous with high socioeconomic status, mostly geriatrics, very few pediatrics.

Program B has meh faculty and poor didactics, but the patient population is perfect: lots of peds, very diverse ethnic and socioeconomic patient population. The residents are not as smart as in program A but they're down to earth and easy to get along with.

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[DrMidlife]

Program A would bore me to death fwiw.

 

[JustPlainBill]

I'm having a hard time ranking between a couple of programs.

Program A has good faculty, great didactics, and really smart residents but I'm not digging the patient population. It's homogenous with high socioeconomic status, mostly geriatrics, very few pediatrics.

Program B has meh faculty and poor didactics, but the patient population is perfect: lots of peds, very diverse ethnic and socioeconomic patient population. The residents are not as smart as in program A but they're down to earth and easy to get along with.

Where do you feel you'll get the best training defined as greatest diversity in terms of pathology, more opportunity to actually do procedures/diagnose/treat patients in your off service rotations (or will you just watch orthopedics doing pre-ops), where questions are encouraged and you're not so overworked in terms of seeing patients that you can't stop and take the time for learning on the fly -- i.e. if you're required to see 10 patients in a half day that are all 99214s or complex geriatric patients, will you really have time to ask an attending a question and get a viable answer? or do they schedule you for 5-8 and know that you'll have questions early on and gradually work you up?

remember, when choosing a residency, it's about training you to be out on your own with no backup (so to speak) -- if the didactics suck, can you make it up on your own? if the faculty sucks, that's a different story -- you can't learn from someone who doesn't know how to do it AND how to teach it -- doers are ok, people who can teach are rare -- remember also as the good book says,"As iron sharpens iron, so does one man to another" -- meaning that you will rise (or fall) to the level of your colleagues -- surround yourself with smart, motivated individuals who have a passion for excellence --- it will cause you to ramp up your A game ---

I did my residency at a University program at a county hospital that was opposed by every specialist/subspecialist under the sun -- the attendings were basically incompetent and reacted poorly to resident questions and the patients were very complex but the majority of the complaints were some variant of the trifecta -- DM/HTN/HLD -- everything else went to the specialists and we suffered ---

choose wisely