Yale vs. Cleveland Clinic/Cole Eye

[oncology2020]

Posting this on behalf of a friend:

What are your thoughts about Yale vs. Cleveland Clinic for residency? Especially if i wanted to do a competitive fellowship such as retina. I heard that reputation of your residency plays a big factor. Which one is considered more prestigious in the field? Which one will give me opportunities to publish? Appreciate any help!

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[DrZeke]

Posting this on behalf of a friend:

What are your thoughts about Yale vs. Cleveland Clinic for residency? Especially if i wanted to do a competitive fellowship such as retina. I heard that reputation of your residency plays a big factor. Which one is considered more prestigious in the field? Which one will give me opportunities to publish? Appreciate any help!

Both are solid programs. Cole might have the edge as its ranked higher and their retina fellowship is quite competitive. If you wanted to publish within retina cole certainly has those opportunities.

 

[DrZeke]

DrZeke,

Where can ophtho applicants like myself find rankings of programs? Thanks!

The ophthalmology program compendium on SDN, word of mouth and your actual interview day are the best ways to get a sense of a program. If you're trying to decide between two interviews on the same day, I think you should try and use those resources as well as your gut. We all try our best to do what we think will fit us with interview choices, rankings and all that. In the end it all falls into place.

Good luck.

 

[rwcb]

Does anyone else have any thoughts about Yale vs Cole? It seems like Yale has had pretty solid fellowship matches to top programs in each subspecialty.

 

[dri]

I don't know much about Yale's program (well, I'm just an applicant so I don't know much about anything), but I think it would be tough for them to compete with Cole. I was at Cole interviewing the other day, and I was very impressed by the program. Their surgical numbers are much better than in previous years (both in terms of cataracts and subspecialty procedures), they have a relatively new PD who is clearly invested in the program and makes resident education a top priority, a highly regarded and ambitious department chair from Emory, an absolutely killer wet lab with a formal curriculum with 100+ hrs of training, and a stellar research infrastructure for residents. Also, the residents are all very happy, both with the program and with one another. The faculty were all approachable and warm during the interview process, which seems to be par for the course for Cole. As you can tell, I enjoyed my interview day there.

 

[Corn Dog]

I don't think you would go wrong with either one. Cole Eye might be a better known program, but Yale residents seem to match into fellowships pretty well as well. I bumped into few fellows who went to Yale for residency during my interview trail last year. There was a retina fellow at UCLA who came from Yale, and there was a cornea fellow at mass eye and ear who had a Heed fellowship also from the Yale residency program.

I interviewed at Cole Eye, and I was really impressed with the facilities and the faculty there. However I wasn't so sure that the residents had enough independence and adequate experience there though. The patients that the residents saw Cole Eye seemed to be private patients of the faculty members, and they didn't appeared to have a big role in patient care. Having said that, they also rotate at a county hospital, where they supposedly are more independent and generate their surgical numbers, but they didn't give us a tour of the county hospital, and I didn't get a feel for how things operated differently.