Hello everyone!
I am having trouble with my rank list. Any thoughts on the following programs would be really appreciated. I am very interested in research and am considering a career in academia. Here goes...
1. Washington University
2. UT Southwestern
3. Vanderbilt
4. Emory
5. MUSC
6. Mayo
7. University of Maryland
8. UVA
9. CCF
10. Georgetown
11. St Luke/ Roosevelt Mt. Sinai
12. Harvard South Shore
Any feedback would be great! Thanks!
Let me preface the following by saying that I'm biased for obvious reasons.
As I've said on this forum many times in the past, I am extremely happy with my decision to come to WashU. The only regret I have about my decision-making process is that I spent too much time/effort debating - I should have just ranked WashU #1 without a second thought (Mayo and CCF were also high on my list, and HSS and St. Luke's were lower down, but were high on the list I had in my mind before I went on the interview trail).
One major reason is because I think that the program provides unparalleled opportunities in the realm of research/academia, while also giving you excellent clinical training that is based heavily on your ability to use science in situations where I've seen many others rely on less scientific means.
Regarding academia - I think that you'll be hard-pressed to find another program that will make you as highly likely to get a faculty position at a top-10 med school straight out of residency. WashU really believes in its own product, so they actively recruit faculty members from our residency class. As long as you're not a bad resident, you'll have the opportunity to stay on as faculty, and you'll likely be able to get competing offers from other places with comparable reputations. In addition to that, the department has lots of research funding (in the form of T-grants) that's just waiting for junior faculty members to come and take it - at other places, you'd usually have to do a fellowship to get a T-grant. Also, if you do research as a resident, we have lots of faculty members with spare funding sitting around for residents to start up projects. And as somebody already said, there is a diverse array of leading researchers in everything from neuromodulation to temperament/character-based psychotherapy to electrophysiology to neurosteroids to molecular neuroscience. And we have the best neuroimaging resources, which will be important going forward (see: Human Connectome Project), which will be a growing necessity for novel research (even if your project doesn't directly involve neuroimaging) in light of the new push to demonstrate mechanisms for new ideas - for instance, I'm involved in a project studying a novel NMDA-related treatment for MDD, and we're just throwing in a neuroimaging component because we can and should. Our department chair also strongly believes that electrophysiology will have real clinical applications during our careers, and there was a paper in Brain Stimulation this month that really supports that belief.
Regarding clinical psychiatry - lots of programs give you great clinical training, but I think that the "medical model" approach that we use is much more than fluff. I've frequently encountered patients treated by non-WashU-trained psychiatrists (including patients who were treated by psychiatrists from well-reputed programs) who have been trying to implement a treatment regimen that's contrary to what the science says, and leads to the patient being undertreated for a while. I don't think this is due to a lack of training quality at those other programs, but rather because few places give you as much (supervised) autonomy as this program does, so people often come out of training with important blind spots. Most of our attendings will encourage you to try things that you're not yet comfortable with, and will encourage you to implement novel ideas as long as you're not suggesting something that might hurt the patient. You get a LOT of didactics to ensure that you know the science behind your clinical decisions, and plenty more to make sure that your clinical decisions aren't overly influenced by science to the point of impracticality. Your second year is full of a myriad of subspecialty rotations, after which you'll be quite competent at managing every one of those subspecialties.
Of course, like I said, I'm biased. I obviously think that we have the best training, and others probably think that they have the best training. But if I had a family member who was looking for a psychiatrist, I would actively insist that they see a WashU-trained person over anybody else.
Anyway, please feel free to ask me more questions. I don't want to say anything negative about the other programs on your list - I'm sure they'll all give you good training. But I can say with 100% certainty that I have never had even a fleeting second thought about my decision to come here.
By the way, St. Louis is an awesome city to be a resident. The hospital is in my favorite part of town, and because it's an inexpensive city, I was able to buy a 3-bedroom townhouse on an intern's salary. And because I'm in my favorite part of town (the area where young professionals like to hang out on the weekends), we have vibrant social lives and we hang out with each other a lot. The hospital has hundreds of residents (at least 500 I think, maybe even 1000), and most of us live in the same ZIP code, so I run into people all the time when I'm out and about. My non-medical friends think I'm rich because $50something K is a pretty good salary in St. Louis. One of our junior faculty members had a more lucrative job offer from Northwestern right out of residency, and he decided to stay here even though he's from Chicago.
