I think every program is looking for the
very best to come and join, but
you know, what we really want is people
who are going to fit into this
close-knit family type of fellowship
that we have.
As a foreign medical graduate, you really
apply broadly
and so Jacksonville was one of the
places that i knew
was very diverse and took individuals
from different
backgrounds and different medical
schools and so this was one of my
options.
I had a good friend of mine who was a
trainee here,
was a fellow here. He had a good opinion
about the programs,
came here to interview and I liked the
place
overall, the environment was enticing.
I think it's the combination of the
faculty that are very supportive in
medicine
and then all in the different
departments including gastroenterology.
Even as a resident, they made you feel a
part of the team and
now as a fellow, I just feel like i have
a lot of support.
Everybody is accomplished, they're smart,
they're hard-working, they're motivated,
they're intelligent, they're driven, but
beyond that, we want somebody
who's unique, somebody who is going to
just come in there and light up the room
with the rest of the group.
We're such a great group of individuals
that we really support each other and I
think the transition for
any fellow, you can talk to them, was
quite easy as well.
And everybody has
their own
expertise we could learn from, which I
think makes it a very fantastic
place for us to train at.
Everyone is interested in
learning and it's an experience,
everyone is happy to be here. I think my
colleagues are fantastic. We have a great
time. We hang out outside of our program
here, outside the hospital.
We're all friendly. We're all supportive
to each other.
We look out for each other. We cover for
each other when needed. We're kind of
like a small family.
Everybody knows what everybody's doing.
Because at the end of the day you spend
your time with these people more than
you spend with your own family, so
it's important to have that good work
environment where you feel comfortable
and you can laugh and you can cry with
these people
and you know it's just an overall great
experience.
There's really a very rich environment
of both academic learning
as well as really bread-and-butter
gastroenterology that
we really think brings out very well-accomplished gastroenterologists that
are able to just hit the ground running
the day they leave this program.
Our attendings specialize in almost
everything
from hepatology to interventional GI to
nutrition,
motility, so there's a lot of variation
in the things that
you get from this program.
Our fellows get an extraordinary amount of hands-on
training.
The average fellow comes out with
1,500 procedures under his or her belt,
which i think is really remarkable.
You can pretty much be very comfortable
doing any procedure after you finish
training here.
I also knew with the patient volume that i would be able to
get my procedures without
any issue and come out of this being
able to handle pretty much any situation
which was a big
factor in me wanting to stay here.
The support we have from our faculty
and our own staff and fellows, that's
what trumps everything.
I really love that they tailor our
education to our level of training as
fellows,
and based off of our interests, so
there's always someone to go to.
You can call them at any time or
approach them about a case that you
think is interesting because they find
it very interesting.
So it's very inspiring and it makes you
want to continue to grow and to learn.
It gives you the right amount of
autonomy versus hand-holding so you
never feel like
you're swimming in an ocean by
yourself and you're trying to
stay afloat. It's never like that. We
really have
great relationships here.
We're very close with our faculty. You can text them
at any time.
We have their cellphones, they're there
for us 24/7
even if they're not on call. No one is
intimidating. You can really
contact anyone of the faculty. You can
contact any one of
your other fellows or residents.
There's
a lot of good camaraderie between our
endoscopy staff
and our fellows which makes our
day-to-day life
very easy to navigate through.
We try to foster an amazing work environment where
everyone gets along.
That's really important not only to grow
yourself as a physician, but as a person.
So I think it makes a great place to
learn and grow in, and even settle down. 
We also have two
research coordinators, so there's a lot
of research opportunities
and they keep track of all of our
ongoing studies and we have a lot of
large randomized control trials that
we're a part of so we get to take place
in
research meetings sometimes
international meetings and we learn a
lot
as far as research goes as well.
I think UF Jacksonville is special
because it's a safety-net hospital.
We get patients from all over Florida
and Georgia.
We serve a very underserved community of
patients who, for
the majority of the patients, do not
have
private insurances. It's also a Level I 
trauma center so
the pathology we get to see is very
diverse and complex.
We work close with the surgeons - the
colorectal surgeons - and just general
surgery so we have a lot of complicated
endoscopic cases that I think a lot of
people don't get to see elsewhere.
When you look at treating those kinds of
individuals you have to be
a lot more patient and a lot more
understanding and that really makes you
grow
as a clinical gastroenterologist trying
to help everyone from varying
backgrounds
you'll vary in a single day from really
bread and butter community type practice
to
quaternary super specialized care where
you're working someone up for a liver
transplant so it's been nice to see
the different parts and the different
diseases that we see here
the variety of the pathologies that we
see and the experience we get
it's been truly a great learning
experience the most of the cases we see
here
are advanced cases which sometimes we
don't see in other
suburban populations that was one of the
reasons which made me pick this program
over other places
if you're interested in really complex
patients lots of diversity lots of
challenges that go beyond just the
medical challenges we have
a lot of social challenges that we have
to overcome in our patient population as
well but that's i think what makes the
whole experience so enriching
at uf health jacksonville we have access
to our simulation lab
we practice under guidance of our
faculty but in the same time
we can go on our own time to practice
versus
a variant of procedure technique it's
really a wonderful resource especially
for our first year
fellows to try to the basis of endoscopy
and
introduce them to the to the actual
endoscopy suite and
gives them a chance to hold the scope
before they start practicing on
real patients and it has a simulation
like
they give you a scenario in the
beginning you start to practice what
you're
going to do in real life but without
harming a patient or anything for the
first time to hold the scope
then under guidance from our faculty who
also teach us how to do the techniques
and then we
practice on ourselves on our own time
it's a good city it's actually one of
the large i think the largest city
in the state of florida it's very spread
out and there's a lot of different
areas and things to do it's a growing
community it's a very big city
it's coastal life but it's city life but
each area is so
different from the beaches to the
historic area
there's so many different places that
you can live and get a different feel
so i really like living in jacksonville
it's where georgia meets florida which
is
fun and interesting i like how it has a
southern feel everybody's very friendly
here
once i came from egypt i that was like i
didn't move from jacksonville i always
have
loved jacksonville from day one i came
here i really love it so
i didn't want to leave it it's a place
with a reasonable cost of living
lots to do we even have not too shabby
sports teams
like the jaguars coming from
pennsylvania obviously a cold
environment so i definitely found
florida to be a much better weather
there are amazing restaurants everywhere
every cuisine you could find
you have all kinds of ethnicities here
as well so you can find your
area which which suits you better
there's a lot of young professionals
here so even when i have
some time off there's the beach not too
far away and then there's the downtown
area so
it's got a lot and the food is actually
really great here as well
and i think the testimony is that if you
look in our city the vast majority of
gastroenterologists in practice you're
trained here
it's a very memorable three years when
when you come and work with us
i i see now it's a really close-knit
program that really brings the best out
of here
clinically you will be very strong after
you've come out of this program
usually by the time you're a third year
you have over 1500 to 1000 cases which
is a lot more than other places
you're in florida the weather is amazing
you have a great patient population
there's no lack of procedures here and
then just the support of the faculty
i love it here it's a great place to
work from the attendings the fellows to
the nurses and techs
everybody's happy it's a good learning
environment
i've really enjoyed my time here i would
tell them
that it really is about having
positive and uplifting work environment
and hopefully we do get to meet these
individuals soon i'm always impressed
when the fellows call me back
a week or two after they've finished
their training and
they always remember what they got here
at the university of florida
i think at the end of the day that's
what we want
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