With July coming to a close, it means that our trainees are about to finish the first block of their academic year. The new CA-3’s are likely amazed at how the time has gone by so fast while our brand new interns may be wondering if they will ever make it beyond the summer!
It has been wonderful to welcome the 18 new interns (and two CA-1 transfers) into the department. Six of the interns are starting their year with three months of anesthesiology and seem to be having a blast. After working for a week straight with a senior resident, they work the following three weeks with a different faculty each week. This type of immersion has been incredibly successful over the past few years and is supplemented with a two-month long daily intern lecture series as well as weekly engagement in our simulation center.
Our Residency Support Council did a phenomenal job this year welcoming our twenty new residents to the department. They hosted both a happy hour event in the neighborhood as well as a picnic brunch in Central Park – both were well attended by faculty and residents from all years. Combined with the big sibling program, the online rotation guides, and the numerous orientations that they ran over the past month the R.S.C. really helped ease the transition into their lives as residents at Cornell and New York City. We do a great job orienting the new housestaff but I have always felt that re-orienting the entire CA-1 class to the department as they finish the intern year might be helpful. With the R.S.C. and our Chief Residents there to help me out, we got together over pizza last week and it was a great way to reconnect as a group, to congratulate them on completing the internship milestone, and to discuss all of the wonderful (and possibly anxiety provoking) things that are to come over the next three years.
We are busy in the Education Suite over the summer preparing for the academic year ahead of us. The residents are immersed in a seminar lecture series that covers Surface Ultrasonography, three CA-3’s will be heading up to Ithaca in the Fall to participate in the Veterinary Anesthesiology Elective, the dates, residents, and faculty are booking their tickets for the fall Global Health Elective, and I am preparing the schedule for our brand new Transfusion Medicine Rotation. Required for all CA-2’s, each resident will rotate for one week in our Blood Bank learning about this ubiquitous facet of our clinical practice.
The promising start to this summer bodes well for an exciting year here at Weill Cornell Anesthesiology!
EB