Where did the summer of 2017 go? Scanning back through my photostream, it started with a lovely dinner with incoming and outgoing chief residents (we miss you, Beth and Dan!); our Vice Chair of Academic Affairs, Kane Pryor; and Chair, Hugh Hemmings.
We sent off our CA3’s — 80% of whom moved on to some of the best fellowships in the country — in grand style at the Pierre Hotel. It was a bitter sweet celebration: two of my favorite pictures from the event are these depicting two of our graduating moms holding new babies…
... and this threesome, below: in addition to our graduates, Kane and I also said farewell to an old friend and colleague, Angie Selzer, whose impact on our residency and department will be felt for years to come. Good luck in Colorado, Angie!
Orientation followed soon thereafter and we welcomed 20 new residents at an Escape the Room team-building event, which has been a fun new tradition. We are planning to do a few more scattered throughout the year so that more faculty and current residents can join in the fun.
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Much of the summer was spent planning for the new year: continuing our newly launched OSCE program, building our summer ultrasound workshop series into a broader POCUS curriculum, and initiating a new professionalism series which will find a home in our Tuesday Mixed Teaching block. I was thrilled to find out that three of our CA2’s achieved top 10% nationally on June’s American Board of Anesthesiology Basic Exam (the first in the series of their licensing exams) and we had a 100% pass rate overall! This is another example of how strong our Apple award winning didactic program is. Cornell Anesthesiology not only excels in education here within the residency program, but also internationally, and in Ithaca as well. We run a full semester Global Health Case Studies course out of the Department of Anesthesiology for undergraduates up at Cornell, and classes started just last week!
And we have really enjoyed welcoming two anesthesiology residents from Rwanda these last two weeks to New York City. We will be launching our second Global Health Elective site (in addition to Punjab, India) in Rwanda in September of 2018, and after meeting Eric and Servant this past February on our scout trip to East Africa, we were thrilled to be able to host them as this excellent summer of 2017 comes to a close.
E.B.