Your top three will greatly depend on your location and where you want to be geographically. How about a brief rundown of some of the programs I interviewed with instead?
McLeod in Florence, SC -- Outstanding program top to bottom. Super exposure to procedures. I felt like the OB experience might be lacking somewhat, but I definitely would not call it a weakness.
AnMed in Anderson, SC -- I think this program offers good experience in Inpatient medicine both adult and peds, and they recently opened a new Women's and Children's hospital that is amazing. I really liked the people here, particularly the PD. I felt like the procedural training was lacking, though.
Trident in Charleston, SC -- In a beautiful city but the whole program didn't seem well organized and cohesive. My interview day there was a disaster. In addition, they forgot to tell the person who was to meet me for dinner the night before to actually meet me for dinner the night before. This was apparently a repetitive problem as I talked to others on the interview trail who also complained of this strangely enough. In all fairness, not everyone felt this way about it, because two of my med school classmates matched there as their first choice.
ETSU in Kingsport, TN -- A pretty darn good program overall, but the PD is a somewhat eccentric guy who grows herbal treatments in his backyard and such. That's cool if you're into that, I guess. But I'm not.
ETSU in Bristol, TN -- Amazing OB experience. On my interview day the first resident I interviewed with (a PGY-3) was like 5-10 minutes late for the interview because she was finishing up a c-section. How cool is that? Not many programs out there where the FP residents are doing sections. Also felt like they offered a decent experience in procedural skills. Some really interesting faculty as well. And a beautiful nearly brand new hospital. You can't go wrong here.
ETSU in Johnson City, TN -- I felt like the program here was great for procedural skills, with lots of EGD's and c-scopes for everyone. I felt like the peds would be lacking and the OB experience was sub-optimal as well. And, this is highly personal, but I felt like I didn't fit in well with the residents.
UT in Chattanooga, TN -- A good program overall, but I didn't feel like I got a great feel for it on my interview day. Everyone was nice and they have a very nice clinic and a pretty hospital. Unfortunately, I didn't get to meet two first class faculty they have that I happened to meet by chance later on after the match. If I had met them, my opinion of them heading into match would likely have been very different. Full of cool people, too.
UT in Knoxville, TN -- What do you want? Whatever it is, this program probably has it. It is opposed, which some won't like. But there are only a few other programs in the hospital though, so there is not a great deal of turf wars. There is a Medicine program, but we don't rotate on their service (we actually have two inpatient teams we have so many patients). In fact, most of the private specialists in the hospital consult us for management of medical issues before the Medicine service. That's pretty cool if you ask me. There are no medicine fellowships here, either so you don't have, for instance GI fellows doing all the scopes or Cards fellows doing all the stress tests. We have a faculty second to none. There are five FP fellowships here: Emergency Medicine, Geratrics, Advanced (operative) Obstetrics, Sports Medicine, and Behavioral Medicine. In addition, there is a fellowship in Homeland Security, as far as I know the only one of it's kind in the entire country, that we share with the medicine department. If I had to pick a weakness, I would say it is the OB experience as a resident and that is probably more a result of the OB department being kinda sub-par than anything. Fortunately, we just recently contracted with the Knox County Health Department to do all their obstetrics so we will have a bunch of our own patients in our own clinic. This will make us a lot less dependent on them for our OB experience, which is a good thing. And there's always the Fellowship if you feel like you need remedial work in OB. We also are the only residents to rotate at East Tennessee Children's Hospital as there is no Peds department here, so we get a great experience in Peds. This is overall a strong program everyone should keep in mind. It's in a really cool location, too. I may be a bit biased, though. I did match here after all.
Hope that helps someone.
