Current mood:	tired
Current music:	The Postal Service - Such Great Heights

columbia and nih
sitting at the philly airport - coming back from columbia and NIH interviews. my impressions:

columbia
they were very conscientious about memorial - the chair gave a intro and compared itself to memorial few times, and memorial did come up a few times during the interview. you'd expect columbia to be really strong in everything since it is columbia, but it's not. it's strengths are lymphoma, breast, prostate. it's actually a fairly small cancer center, compared to uab. a bit weaker than uab... but its basic sciences are great, it being columbia. fellows seemed to be really friendly, faculty seemed very nice, especially the program director. their division chief relatively new, they want to focus on developing careers of academics people, like me... seemed like they would be very supportive of me staying there as faculty after my lab research and stuff. only draw backs - no subsidized housing in nyc, and they don't have a great clinical presence in leukemia. i'll have to consider.... it'll be interesting to compare columbia w memorial.

NIH
a really strange place! foran was right - research, of course is phenominal. but clinically, very strange. so they have this clinical research hospital - 90% of patients there are some protocol - they are mostly failed therapy people w metastatic disease. good thing is, i would be very experienceed w clinical research protocols. downside? i still need to be a good oncologist and i am not sure how much experience they have diagnosing and treating disease accoridng to standard of care. but then, what is standard of care? standard of care always changes anyway..... for their standard of care stuff they go to georgetown or naval hospital, and for leukemia, they go to hopkins. seems scattered.... i don't know. and the fellows seemed a bit.... nerdy.... i don't know.... it's a great program in theory, and i'll be okay w it, but i just didn't feel it.

so the search for the perfect program continues....