Medical School: Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine
Undergraduate School: Texas A&M University
I have lived in Texas my entire life and knew that location was going to be important to me when choosing a residency location. That being said, I would have chosen the Texas A&M|Christus Spohn program if it would have been in Alaska, but more on that later. I went to Texas A&M for undergraduate where I somehow managed to trick my beautiful wife into marrying me. I then dragged her to the high desert of West Texas and attended medical school at Texas Tech in Lubbock. Continuing our trek across Texas together we now call Corpus Christi home. It’s been a great place to live so far—way more rain than Lubbock had, and we are really looking forward to a mild winter. We love taking our daughter to the beach and letting her play in the surf and sand, and the Mexican food here is phenomenal. But what about the residency, you ask? As promised…
One day on my family medicine rotation during third year I was talking about where to do away rotations with a fourth year who was applying to EM. He told me about the ultrasound rotation he had done in Corpus Christi and said that I should really make it a point to get down to Corpus and see what it was all about. I took his advice, signed up for the rotation, as was ruined for the rest of my away rotations.
I constantly found myself comparing the other programs back to Corpus. I would have to keep myself from always asking why not just do the ultrasound at the bedside instead of sending it to radiology, or why not just reduce this dislocation ourselves instead of calling ortho? It seemed that everywhere else I went so much of the scope of my practice was being farmed out to specialists instead of me learning how to do it. Here at CCEMRP we do emergency medicine. We are not triage doctors calling in specialists to take care of our patients. We run the department. There is no anesthesia residency taking our airways, there is no ortho residency taking our fractures, there is no surgery residency running trauma—it’s us.
In addition to thinking back on how patients were managed differently in Corpus, I also kept thinking back on the community of the residency program here. I know everyone says this, but our conferences are amazing. I was legitimately disappointed a few weeks ago because instead of having five hours of lecture in the basement, we went to the Texas State Aquarium one week and then had a mass casualty simulation at the beach the next week. It’s not that those things weren’t awesome, but I learn so much in lecture every week and all of my fellow residents do such a great job of presenting really interesting topics that I felt like I missed out on great learning opportunities. And our attendings! They really are incredible. The program as a whole just has the X factor, the intangibles that I didn’t get at my other interviews or away rotations.
Two things will happen if you come here: You will get phenomenal training and have a blast doing it. Residency is a demanding time. You’re going to be tired at the end of the day no matter where you go, so why not go someplace where you will really learn how to practice EM instead of learning how to pick up a phone and call a specialist? And lastly, residency should be about more than just being board-certified when this is all said and done. If you don’t enjoy the journey it’s going to be a long three years.