Did rotations there as a student. Here is my view:
There is a lot of work, there is some scut, but you definitely get some teaching... But, that being said, I think Maimo does a decent job of trying to teach their residents....
They claim to teach; a lot of time is wasted on so called teaching sessions, but the 'teachers' (most, barring a few exceptions who are outstanding) are neither sincere nor knowledgeable. When it comes to 'scut', it truly depends on how you would define the word. True, you would hardly ever need to push the gurneys of patients into radiology. But, while it is a very 'busy' program, a substantial part of the busy time is utilized in
1) taking care of geriatric patients with hardly any prognosis, on whom everything, including the kitchen sink is thrown in to alter the natural history of disease
2) managing the exceptionally unrealistic families of patients
3) learning diffidence based medicine and defensive medicine practised by private attendings who outnumber "service" attendings (and contribute by making residents learn how NOT to be, to quote the program director)
4) learning providence based medicine preached by rabbis
Most of what I have mentioned above is due to the unique location of the hospital in the community
While you as a resident would get to manage very sick patients (a lot of vented patients are on the 'floors'), your overall approach as an IM doctor would be very severely stunted.
While they 'encourage' research, there is neither any mentoring nor any true interest in the core medicine faculty to do any research. Only some attendings in subspecialties are involved in data mining that usually results in case reports and an occasional abstract; hardly any pubmed cited publication.
They prefer in-house candidates for all fellowships. However, residents find it extremely difficult to get positions in academic centers outside, be it for fellowships or for jobs. The training whether in IM or subspecialties is only good enough to continue in private practice.
They claim that they are a 'not-for-profit' organization; they are one of the financially healthy hospitals in NYC, thanks to some astute business minds in the administration. Yet their residents get paid among the least in NYC.
If for whatever reason, working in a community hospital in NYC is your cup of tea, this one is much better than others in the NYC area. By all means, you would get exposed to all 6 core competencies of ACGME. But how competent you would get, is a totally different matter altogether.
In order to circumvent the shortcomings, the program usually carefully selects applicants, quite a few of who are FMGs, again quite a few who have had prior experience / postgraduate training in their countries of origin. So it has a reputation of being 'FMG friendly'. While this is encouraging for FMGs, the true reason for FMG friendliness arises out of the inevitability of the fact that most AMGs would shun programs having the negatives that this program does.
Sorry this post may not help people in this match cycle, but I hope it might give some deeper insights to aspiring applicants in the future...
