Just my thoughts, but I did go through this almost 5 years ago.
If you really, really want to have the best opportunities to develop skills for an academic career, Columbia is the best and safest best. They have very well known attendings of both the old and younger generation. On the academic side, Stanley Chang is considered one of the big legends in retina, and younger attendings like Royce Chen are heavily involved in VBS. Yanuzzi and Freund will also give you some of the best medical retina training in the world, which is crucial for academic medicine. However, their surgical numbers are not that great, and you may not get enough primaries to feel comfortable (last ive heard it’s 250-300 max, which is barely enough).
Stanford is what I consider a “younger” program, but I think they have lots of potential. They’ve recruited a lot of faculty that I think will be bigger leaders in the field (Nguyen and Do, Prithi Mruthyunjaya who’s a good guy in general), and have both younger and older guys that are known in the field. If I could go through the match again (I don’t), I would have really given Stanford more thought. One of my colleagues trained there and she was well trained there.
Illinois is kind of the middle ground. Well known academicians (Lim, Mieler, R.V. Chan) with a good reputation, and you get good surgical volume. I would argue that if peds retina is your thing, IEEI would give you the best training. I also know a few people who’ve trained here who Are definitely much smarter than me. It’s a well balanced program and you can’t go wrong.
Hope this helps some. I’m a few years removed from it all but I don’t think things have changed that much.
