03-02-2020, 06:02 PM
(02-28-2020, 11:52 AM)Guest Wrote: I rotated at UT Houston this year. Overall, I would rate the experience low and the program was low on rank list as a result.
Pros: The program has grown fast. It is only about 10 years old and is now taking 3 residents per year. Research opportunities are good as well. One of the faculty recently received an R25 grant which he will be able to distribute to neurology and neurosurgery residents to support their research projects. They have several faculty who specialize in open and endovascular. I saw several open vascular procedures while I was there. Dr. Day is very dedicated to resident education and teaching His didactics are generally very good. UTH offers enfolded fellowships in several specialties. They had the best peds experience of any of my rotations, if that is your thing. They have excellent operative volume with typically around 6-7 first start rooms each day. Some of the residents let me do quite a bit in the OR. They interview rotators during the sub-I to save students travel costs during the interview season.
Cons: Parking is a disaster. Most rotators end up paying $13 per day to park in visitor parking because there are no other tenable options. That ends up costing over $300 just in parking fees. During the 4 week rotation you will spend one dedicated week in clinic in addition to a few scattered days with whichever service you are on the other weeks. They try to spin it as giving you exposure to more faculty, but in my opinion, it is a poor use of time for a visiting student to spend 1/4 weeks dedicated to clinic. Also, their call system is confusing and terrible. They use a night float system so there is always a resident in house. There is also a PA in- house on weeknights. However, residents are also required to answer pages from home at night regarding their assigned service and come in if there is an issue with one of their patients. It isn’t clear to me why that is necessary. It seems that it could be handled by the in-house resident and PA, with help from the senior back up if things get crazy. Students are not allowed to be present for morning sign out. Apparently one of their students reported the residents for comments that made during the sign out, so their solution was to ban students. It is nearly impossible to stay up to date on patient events as a student, sign out is generally the best time to find out what is going on. Also, it just makes the program not feel very welcoming. The residents were fairly malignant towards each other. There were a couple that were singled out and picked on and/or talked about behind their backs regularly. The residents were also pretty nervous/scared to operate with the chair and PD. More so than I had seen at other programs. One of the biggest red flags was that I witnessed two residents intentionally lie about intraoperative findings to the chair.
Lied about intraoperative findings? DAYUM.
