ATul Jain, MD
Contributing Editor
Beaumont certainly lives up to its lofted reputation as one of the best clinical fellowships around. The interview is a no frills experience; it starts in the morning and is over after lunch. Beaumont is a group of some 12 – 14 essentially private practice retina attendings who have a passion for teaching and academics, unfortunately, the facility they are associated with is not a well known institution (at least to layperson).
The facilities are fantastic and new in the medical office building. The retina group runs 2 operating rooms out of the 70+ main OR’s in the hospital for 5 days per week! Thus, there is always a retina room running and it is easy to add on a surgical case. There are now 2 fellows per year, and they remain at Beaumont the whole 2 years, attendings are the only ones who travel to satellite facilities to generate surgical volume, but all cases are taken care of at Beaumont. The fellows spend about 2.5 days per week in the OR and the rest in clinic. There is talk of allowing for fellows to have 0.5 days per week as academic time. Surgical numbers are incredibly high, about 900 primary surgical cases during the 2 year fellowship. These are all cases that the attendings entrust upon the fellow. There is a significant pediatric surgical experience at Beaumont, somewhere on the order of 200 or so cases (lasers and operative).
The interview day starts off with a casual intro from the director and a small breakfast, and then off to interviewing mostly one-on-one with about 8 of the faculty (two interviews were 2 on 2, one with attendings and one with the current 1st year fellows). They are all about 15 minutes and there are a few questions about research and such, but mostly it seemed as though they just wanted to get to know the applicants. No trick questions or pimping. After the interviews there is a quick tour and then lunch at PGA country club and the day is over.
While a wonderful fellowship with a great infrastructure and super strong faculty it’s essentially a fellow’s dream program, except for the fact that there is almost no resident – fellow interaction (and YES, Beaumont does have an ophthalmology residency…) and the fellow must live near Detroit for two years. Another fact that wasn’t readily apparent until one looks at the famed topographic map of where fellows go after fellowship does one stumble upon the fact that just about all graduating fellows remain in the Michigan or Midwest area of the US, only 1 of 40+ fellows made it to the west coast, and most of the graduating fellows seem to have joined private groups.
If you are looking for a program with one of the best infrastructures out there, great surgical training, superb faculty, a seemingly sane schedule with time for research, and placement into a solid private practice job this is the program for you – the downside is snow, a program that might be highly regarded in the world of retina but not by many outside that small bubble, and the infamous 8 mile.
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