Interview: Exempla St. Joseph's Hospital

First Impressions: I had driven by St. Joe's (as the hospital is known) back in August when I visited my sister, so I knew it was a fairly good size (550 beds), and I'd also heard good things about the program from one of my ICU residents, who'd gone to med school at CU. My sister lived about 30-40 minutes from the hospital but I was fine with commuting. Had to wake up before 6:00 a.m. to make a 7:00 a.m. interview but it was fine.
Pre-Interview dinner: A meet-and-greet was held downtown at a bar called Lodo's, former Mattie's House of Mirrors back in the day when the 2nd floor was a brothel), and I was among the first to arrive. Imagine my surprise when I saw a familiar face: Jeremy! He'd interviewed at St. Joe's earlier that day and would be interviewing at CU the same day I had my St. Joe's interview. He seemed really enthusiastic about the program and said that Denver was the farthest east he's applying (geographically). Our only regret was that we couldn't attend Kasha's memorial service. A lot of residents attended the social, and all of them were nice and helpful. Jeremy and another applicant kept talking about how great morning report was, so I knew I'd have to see it for myself.
Interview Day: This was the smallest interview group I'd ever been in; there were only six of us altogether. The reason for this was that the PD interviews with every applicant, but it turned out to be a good thing b/c we all got to know each other sort of well. We first had breakfast with one of the interns, Carolyn, and she let us to the cafeteria and told us to get whatever we wanted. We had to write down the amount we spent at the cashier table. Fortunately my food did not cost the most. We chatted for a while with Carolyn about the program before the PD, Dr. Gibbons, came in to speak to us. He went into more detail about what the program had to offer and then turned us loose for interviews. My first interview was with him. He was very nice and didn't ask any hard questions, just what drew me to "St. Joe's" and other common questions. He did read aloud some comments from my Dean's letter and my rec letters, and like an idiot I said, "Wow" when I heard some of the things Dr. RR wrote about me. Even still, Dr. G assured me that based on my application I am definitely competitive for a spot at St. Joseph's, and that was good. In between interviews, my fellow applicants and I sat together and chatted about random things. Then I went to my next interview, which was low-stress as well. My interviewer asked how I heard of St. Joe's and seemed pleased when I told him that an ICU resident I worked with (Tony G) had graduated from CU and had many positive things to say about the hospital. "It's nice that people have heard of us outside of Colorado," he said.

After all interviews, we went to attend morning report, which was unlike any other morning report I'd ever been to. One resident, Travis, immediately said that he had an "awesome" case to present despite good-natured teasing from his peers, and the case was interesting (skin lesions secondary to drug toxicity). This was followed by two other interns reporting on interesting patients they had seen recently, and each time, someone was asked to interpret the patient's EKG and CXR, or whatever tests are necessary. One case showed a brain contusion that looked like an epidural hematoma (except you can see brain tissue), along with a skull fracture and contrecoup lesion secondary to trauma. Yikes. But through it all, the residents were laughing and joking amongst each other and with the attendings when appropriate, and this, to me, was what "camaraderie" was. One of the guys even compared it to "being in college again." Someone once said that the residents at St Joseph's are among the happiest in the area, and I was seeing that now with my own eyes that it was no exaggeration. Also during morning report, specialists will come in when needed to do some teaching, which I thought was cool. Usually only general medicine internists attend morning report.

After morning report the three prelim applicants went with a prelim intern on a tour while the categoricals followed Matt, the chief resident whom I met last night. He showed us the call rooms (nice view), the clinic, the ER, the ICU, and even the work-out room (which he said was lousy but I thought it was much better than the one at my school so no complains from me). Lunch was, once again, at the cafeteria where we got anything we wanted, and Matt introduced us to a 3rd year (he called it "turd year") who's actually found a job at AMH effective next fall. He went to UTA for undergrad so he was familiar with Arlington. Noon conference featured a lecture on "altered mental status" which I thought was useful. The lesson of the day: know how to recognize locked-in syndrome.
Overall Impression:
Pros: Denver, good training for either primary care or fellowship, genuine camaraderie, nice call rooms, closely affiliated with University of Colorado
Cons: Small program (9 categoricals per year), not university-based