Inside Advice on Good Programs?

[zrkk2]

---

Members do not see this ad.

Hi everyone. I'm a 3rd yr student trying to decide where to go from here. I'm thinking about Chicago, DC, New York, Atlanta, and some bigger cities in the Southeast. Does anybody have any advice on what some of the better programs in these areas are? Appreciate your help. Thanks.

 

[johnd]

I guess it depends on what you mean by better. If you mean the ones with the best reputation:

Chicago - U of C, Northwestern
DC - none of them
NY - cornell, colombia
atlanta - emory
southeast - duke, univ of alabama

lots of old threads arguing about different programs, especially the NY ones

 

[irlandesa]

I guess it depends on what you mean by better. If you mean the ones with the best reputation:

Chicago - U of C, Northwestern
DC - none of them
NY - cornell, colombia
atlanta - emory
southeast - duke, univ of alabama

lots of old threads arguing about different programs, especially the NY ones

I would add Sinai, Einstein-Montefiore, and NYU to NYC. Also Baltimore is close to DC and has JHU and U of Maryland Medical Center, both awesome programs. Tulane and Miami-Jackson Memorial Hospital are great in the SE, also UNC-Chapel Hill. If you're not extremely concerned about reputation, I'd add NYMC St. Vincents to your NY list and Georgetown and GWU for DC (although these are all good programs in my opinion, I'm applying to them).

 

[DrKnowItAll]

This is definitely a relative thing. Once you are in the job market, where you have done your residency means very little. A friend of mine from Hopkins Cardiology apparently lost his dream job in NYC to a guy from NYMC St. Vincent's. He had strong job offers in the Baltimore area but really wanted to be in NYC. At the end he had to compromise and got a job in Northern VA, close to DC.

Sometimes the location of a residency/fellowship program means more than it's reputation. This is especially true for places like NYC which tend to be very inbred. Networking gets you much farther when it comes to finding a good job than the status of your program.

Academics is of course a different story.

 

[zrkk2]

thanks for the info everyone, reputation is certainly an important factor to me since i may opt to do a competitive fellowship afterword but i definitely want to be at a place where the emphasis is more on teaching us to be good doctors instead of working us to death.

 

[Kalel]

I agree with not wasting your time in applying to GT or GWU. If you must be in DC, GWU is better then GT, but there are tons of stronger programs then GWU that are close to DC but not in them (so you won't have to pay for housing in DC, which is really expensive). Another program in Maryland that seems to do pretty well when it comes to fellowship placement is JHU-Bayview. Technically, it's a community program, but they still manage to send their residents to top notch fellowship spots. In the southeast, don't forget about the NC programs like UNC and Duke. I've also heard very good things about UVA in Charlottesville. Anyways, where you end up applying is ultimately going to end up being partially dependent on how strong of an applicant you are. My chairperson reccomended that I apply to 3-4 reach schools, 3-4 schools well within my range, and then 3-4 "safety" schools. I put the safety schools in parenthesis because you never know which programs you will end up liking until after you visit, you may end up ranking a few of your safety schools above your reach schools if you find that you like the program better. You will find that most university programs, mid-tier and above, claim to have no trouble sending most (80% and above who apply) of their residents into the "competetive" fellowships.