From an anonymous emailer:
I’ve got a random question for you that I hope your experience might
help with. I’m a 4th year medical student, matching into EM. …
I’m working on my rank list… Can
you by any chance give me any insight into the residencies at UT-Houston
(Hermann), UTMB, or Shreveport, LA? I’ve got a very strong reason to match
in the area…but I don’t necessarily have a good feel for how well grads
of the programs are trained. If you can help, thanks. If not, thanks for
the great site.
I have no personal knowledge of any of these; any suggestions?
Roll a d3
I think PandaBear went through Shreveport, LA. Might check with him.
Got a buddy from residency who is now a professor at Shreveport – seems like they have a nice program. Shreveport is a decent town, too. Don’t know squat about the other two.
I don’t know if you would take any advice from “just a medical transcriptionist” but I also worked in the Texas Medical Center for many years. If you can’t learn what you need to know in the UT Hermann system, I don’t know if you can learn it anywhere. I worked with surgeons who had residents rotate through and those guys would actually fight over who got the Hermann resident that day.
My unqualified two cents.
Hermann will definitely teach you what you need to know. And then some. I’ve had friends and family come out of both UTMB and Hermann.
One consideration, it’s more expensive to live in the Houston med-center, but cheap to buy a home if you are willing to commute. UTMB has the advantage of the beach, but it is also far, far away from the nightlife you’ll find in downtown Houston. Not that you’ll have time.
I agree. Go the Houston route.
Well, I don’t really know much about Shreveport’s program though…
but between the other 2, I’d pick Houston.
If you’re down to the wire, don’t neglect looking at the curriculums closely. For all three years. A lot of medical students get so focused on the intern year that they don’t look closely at R2 and R3 year.
I think Houston’s program has an ICU month as third years. At that stage in your training I can promise you, working in the ICU will not be high yield for what you’ll be doing in the ED, and you won’t want to be on a busy call month at that stage in the game when you’re about to be out doing EM. Plus they do a month of hand surgery where they have to go to the OR and play the role of a med student, again not a high yield way to spend your time.
UTMB is plenty busy, but questions to ask would be how their interactions are with the trauma team and what percentage of their faculty are EM trained. It’s a new program and I don’t know the answers to either of these questions, but things you would want to know before you rank it high.