University of Minnesota

My thoughts from interview day:
University of Minnesota - These residents work very hard. They cover 2 level one trauma centers and 4 hospitals around Minneapolis/St Paul. They have the largest VA in the country, which has 2 times the volume in ortho of any other VA in the country. Spend time there as an intern, 6 months as a PGY-3, and 3 months as a chief. The chiefs run the services at the VA and residents get a lot of hands on experience here. The sports experience here is at TRIA, a large high volume sports experience. The residents are well protected from scut/paper work in all parts of the program, with lots of mid-level PAs/NPs. That being said some of them said the experience was “like drinking from a fire hose” as a PGY-2 and PGY-3 because of the incredible volume of cases between all of the sites that they cover. There seems to be a great relationship between the residents and the attendings, with the attendings being very dedicated to the program and to education in general. It is home call at all times during residency, but it's an honors system. Meaning if you worked all night you go home in the AM, while if you slept for 6 hours you stay the next day. 40% of residents from this program go straight into private practice but some do fellowships. The ones that do fellowships get pretty good ones, especially in spine, trauma, and shoulder/elbow. There are research opportunities that are encouraged for those that are interested, every resident has to do one project and it is not shoved down the throats of people that are not interested. Minneapolis seems awesome as a city, but it is also cold (it was -14 degrees F on the morning of my interview). I hear the summers are beautiful and there is a thriving downtown with lots of new buildings/condos and a very young nightlife.

Overall, a solid program that will train you to be a good surgeon and you will have the option to pursue academics if you decide thats what you want to do.

Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. I'd love to hear if other people felt similarly.

I agree with all that above. I'm from MN, went to UMN for undergrad and interviewed there for residency. I would have loved to match there, but I'm happy where I ended up. The one thing I would say is that I didn't get the impression that the residents were overworked (this seems to have come up from other people I talked to) even though they do cover a lot of hospitals. Several had families with multiple children and were able to juggle a healthy family life with their work schedule. The hospitals are rather spread out and if you dont live in a central location you may be doing a lot of driving. Traffic in Minneapolis/St. Paul is not bad however. The city is beautiful ad there is a lot of stuff to do, especially if you're into outdoorsy type things and like water (MN has more shoreline than any other state in the country). The is something along the lines of 80 faculty in the program, so it is huge. They have the largest or second largest pediactric ortho group in the country. They have a huge trauma faculty. As stated above their VA experience is 2nd to none. Overall I was very impressed. They don't interview a lot of people though - I want to say there was only like 50 interviewees and half were rotators (all for 8 spots).

How do they get away with so few interviews? They interview less people than some top programs.

UMN has a somewhat unique setup in terms of rotations in that for your PGY-2, PGY-3 years you rotate with your fellow residents in your year. You split up in groups of 4 and essentially run the service with the chief residents. It seems to be a great setup to get to know your classmates, and it nice b/c you all are on the same level, so splitting up the cases is fair. The downside is that you do not get to work with the other levels as much. The trauma experience is second to none covering 2 level one centers (6 mo PGY2 and 6 mo PGY3), with several staff being former chairmen of OTA. The biggest downside of the program is that there is 5 sites, which spreads everyone out.

There are a lot of "double gophers" and "triple gophers" in the program (i.e. people who did undergrad, med school and now residency all at the U of MN) and it is not by chance. It seems like they always have a good base of applicants that they can count on ranking them high internally and a decent number of the non-rotators who interviewed there had some sort of connection to MN. In fact I hear that not very long ago they used to require a "Minnesota Statement" in addition to your normal PS in order to even get an interview. So basically I think they can get away with interviewing so few because they feel fairly confident that the ones they do interview will be ranking them high.

Gotcha, makes sense. Thanks for all the great information guys/gals. Once again, Orthogate delivers.

I interviewed at Minnesota a couple of years ago. IIRC, they interviewed 48 people for 8 spots - reason they "get away" with this being this selective, I believe, is that they do a very thorough job pre-screening and profiling applicants in terms of "fit" (certainly not, at least in my case, purely board scores). At the very least I can say that everybody who interviewed me was intimately familiar with all aspects of my application, good or bad (see: board scores), and seemed genuinely interested in learning more through pertinent questions - including the "ethics room", which I guess you could take either way.

Overall, I found the interview experience at UM to be very pleasant and impressive, winter weather notwithstanding. I cannot echo sentiments that this program is not family friendly; quite to the contrary, I noted a) many female residents and b) many with children. The residents seemed happy and down to earth, and everybody (!) I interacted with during the entire process seemed personable, invested, and genuinely nice.

One downside to me, as noted, was the distances between the training sites...and OK, the winter weather although I really do believe that Minneapolis/StP offers a very good quality of life overall.

In short, I thought this was a superb program that I would have been glad to match at. Alas, I ranked them second and ended up at my number one choice, but would have had no reservations about going to this program whatsoever. On a side note, several faculty, including the program director, and staff contacted me after the match to follow up and congratulate me...again, this seemed like a very personable program, top to bottom. As somebody who did not match there, I recommend this program very highly.

I hope this helps - best wishes!

Thank you for your input! Appreciated.