RETURNING
TO FLORIDA
TO PRACTICE
Alumni’s relationships
with regional campus
communities are
major factor
300 are in Florida. They tend to cluster around the regional campus where
they did their clinical training.
“A big part of what we do at the regional campus is develop
relationships,” said Daytona Beach Regional Campus Dean Luckey
Dunn. “What the students see here – and at all the regional campuses – is
a community of physicians that are all pretty collegial, agreeing to teach
students in a certain method, teaching them so well that they’re invited to
residencies at Johns Hopkins, at Wake Forest, at Vanderbilt. And it also
fosters a desire to come back and be involved in that process.”
In this article, we’re using Daytona Beach to represent all six regional
campuses. There are numerous reasons why so many alumni who leave the
state for residency eventually come back. Here are five:
·
For nearly all College of Medicine students, Florida is home.
Family members live here. That’s a powerful draw.
·
Students form strong attachments to their regional campuses.
The intensity, similar to what they’ll experience later during
residency, is enhanced by a campus staff that constantly nurtures
them. It builds powerful loyalty.
BY RON HARTUNG
·
The one-on-one teaching they get from community physicians is
roughly equivalent to a two-year audition for a job.
·
With the College of Medicine’s network of campuses and
training sites, a returning graduate is just about guaranteed a job
somewhere in Florida.
hen Stephen Viel applied
for residency at Johns
Hopkins Hospital,
someone there called
a College of Medicine
faculty member in
Daytona Beach to ask,
in so many words: “Is he
really this good?”
“It wasn’t that I’m so great,” said Viel (M.D., ’09). “It’s just that reading
the letter from the faculty member, you would’ve thought my mom wrote
it. It was a page and a half of anecdotes and personal interactions.”
At many medical schools, no faculty member would know a student well
enough to include such detail. “He could write that because we worked
together for six weeks, one-on-one, day in, day out,” Viel said, “and had
lunch together every day, in a way that you just don’t get elsewhere.”
Such relationships were part of the reason that Viel, given the chance
to stay with Johns Hopkins after residency, returned to Daytona Beach
instead. He’s one of an increasing number of alumni who leave the state for
residency training at top programs – but come back.
·
Alumni believe in the college’s mission to serve the underserved,
and they want to become part of the faculty that gave them such
a meaningful medical education.
“For residency, I wanted to see things done differently, go somewhere
completely different, because in the back of my mind I always thought I
would come back,” said Viel, now an emergency room physician at Halifax
Health. “I have family in the area. I knew Peter Springer, who is in charge
of the Emergency Department, because I rotated through here as a third-
year student. When my wife and I were looking for places to work, Halifax
was already on the short list. I really liked the hospital and what it stood
for. Once I DID apply, it helped that Dr. Springer knew me.”
He’s also on the College of Medicine faculty, a role he finds rejuvenating.
“It reminds you of the doctor that you set out to be,” Viel said.
“Teaching was a big selling point when I considered coming back.”
Two of his ER colleagues are also College of Medicine alumni: Jessica
Gershen (M.D., ’11) and Rob Daly (M.D., ’12). They’ve been a couple since
med school. She did her residency training at Brooklyn Hospital Center, he
at LSU. One thing they noticed was how well-prepared they were.
“At FSU, you get more one-on-one time, not only with the dean but
with the professors,” Daly said. “More hands-on experience, too. We had
skills that other students hadn’t even witnessed, because they’re standing
behind two sets of residents and the attending physician who are doing the
procedure. Sometimes they weren’t even able to see what was going on.”
So Daly and Gershen were pretty sure they’d be coming back to Halifax.
“Those were world-class people we were working with,” Daly said. “We
21
W
Of the 500-some College of Medicine graduates now practicing, about