I'll post about Yale - It is a straight up mediocre program hiding behind the Yale name. The quality of the residents is very broad - both polarizing personalities to extremely personable. Of note - one of the top feeders to the Yale New Haven program is SGU (ala doximity). Lots of IMGs. There is also talk of closing the Bridgeport program and merging the residents, i.e. making the quality of the residents even more poor. Even though the quality of the program might not be great job placement does not seem to be an issue howeve as private practice jobs love to have the Yale name (this was told to me by a resident verbatim) . Won't last long however if you have a ****ty training - which is very possible here as the program is essentially attendings/fellow driven. The number of cases you read is completely up to you and how motivated you are - no one will pressure you to read more. This reminds me of the Yale medical school system (no grades, no shelves, lol).
Also IR - wow, without a double the most malignant program I've been to so far. Mostly FMGs. They fired one of the fellows last year. They don't give a **** about work life balance and will literally take EVERY IR consult in the hospital. Sure, there is a good mix of high level IR (except PAD) , but also a ton of bitchwork cases that are usually done by other departments or midlevels at other places. Typical work day (which the attendings take pride in apparently is 5am to 10PM when you are NOT on call).
Oh also - they also loved talking about the resources Yale has. This is true. Lots of well known faculty - but whatever, they didn't seem personable. The IR chair was really rude to the fellows and generally unapproachable.
Tldr - Hiding behind the Yale name, a massively mediocre and malignant program with high potential for research.
I had to double-check that this wasn't the IR forum, because a lot of this is targeted at IR. I'll go ahead and bite. I'm a med student at Yale and did the medical student sub-internship in IR.
DR Program:
They're the third largest radiology residency with 54 residents. There's bound to be at least a few internationals, not sure why this is a big deal? I haven't met all the residents, but those who I did meet seemed friendly and intelligent. The vast majority had positive things to say about Yale. Moreover,
six residents applied for
three internal IR spots last year...that tells you there's internal demand to stay at Yale. I don't know how many daily reads residents are required to do, but the clinical volume is certainly high. Yale is a major research institution and academic scholarship is encouraged.
IR Program:
I can't beat around the bush, IR is tough at Yale. The case volumes are insane and the hours can run from 6 am to 9 pm or later, day in, day out, with much of it due to slow turnover. In many ways it's tougher than surgery because there's little downtime. Fellows spend their inter-procedural time writing notes and prepping for the next day. Moreover, IRorBustguy is correct on two negative aspects of the program - The fellows do a ton of consults and small procedures (lines, ports, tubes, etc.), that are often done by PAs at other institutions. I feel this is a major drawback of the program. There are two PAs/NPs who assist with the consults during the daytime, but at night it falls squarely on the consult fellow. There are five fellows, so every fifth week a fellow is on consults. Consult week ends up being the most tiring because the pager rarely leaves time for sleep. I think the residency will help with this by having PGY-5 IR residents handle consults, but right now it falls to the fellows.
With all that said, Yale IR is one of the few
if only places that does absolutely everything. This is including neuro-IR, PAD [not sure why IRorBustguy said no PAD], prostatic artery embolizations, pulmonary AVM embolizations (Yale is an HHT center), pediatrics (Dr. Dillon trained in pediatric rads, adult body IR and pediatric IR), etc. IR has a seat on the tumor board and actively contributes to decision-making for HCC patients. For PAD, there's an attending, Dr. Aruny, at the main campus who does arterial interventions, and additional arterial work is done at the VA. For neuro, while not technically part of the curriculum, fellows are welcome to come into cases in the neuro-IR room which is adjacent to the regular IR-rooms (and by adjacent, I mean it's not even labeled as neuro-IR, it's just a biplane IR room).
Lastly, Yale has top IR faculty in nearly every discipline. Five of the established faculty are contributing authors to the "Handbook of Interventional Radiology." Dr. Geschwind and Dr. Kevin Kim are two of the most prolific interventional oncologists. Dr. White (now retired) and Dr. Pollak run the HHT center. Dr. Ayyagari has more BPH embos than nearly anyone in North America, and so on...If you want to go into academic-IR, then doing IR/DR residency at Yale makes a lot of sense. You may not have a lot of time during your IR years, but the opportunities are abundant and the time is available during your DR years.
Bottom-line: Yale IR is a place where you can participate in
any kind of interventional procedure, but it comes with a lot of scut and time.
