ATul Jain, MD
Contributing Editor
Perched high atop a hill overlooking the entire city with a special tram that carries you into the clouds, Casey is a wonderfully peaceful place to visit. The introduction to the program is casual and the fellows are all very friendly and happy. The tour is fantastic, and sans the perpetually overcast weather, everything seems quite well structured. Faculty and staff are all very kind and sincere. There are a total of 4 surgical retina fellows (2 per year) who speak highly of the program and seem to quote pretty decent surgical numbers, somewhere on the order of 400 or so primary cases over the fellowship.
The night before the interview they took all the applicants out for a nice dinner with a private room where all the fellows showed up and answered all questions in a casual manner. The main drawback one learns is that there is an enforced restrictive covenant that prohibits working anywhere in the state of Oregon for something like 2 – 5 years post-fellowship (unless of course they take you on as faculty).
The interview is a panel consisting of about 8 retina faculty who question applicants in a very non-threatening way for about 20 minutes, and then it’s over. No difficult questions or anything of such, it seemed as though they just wanted to get to know the applicant a little and ensure that they were “normal.”
The cases that fellows do are essentially all attending cases that are handed down to the fellow, there is no fellow clinic per se, though for ½ day per week the fellow staffs the residents in a retina clinic at the VA and the fellow is essentially the attending for these patients. All cases are staffed by an attending.
Call is one fellow on per week at a time and seems to be quite mild with only about 1 surgical case per week and between 0 – 4 over the weekend. There is not too much resident – fellow interaction and the emphasis is certainly more clinical than academic or research oriented.
While not one of the powerhouses of academics, it seems as though Casey is a hidden gem of a program with very affable attendings, fellows who enjoy being at the program, a healthy clinical volume, and a mild mannered but well structured call schedule.
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