Pulmonary and Critical Care fellows welcome message

[Text on screen: Welcome from the Chief Fellows]

Alex Wong, MD:
Hello, I'm Alex Wong. I am one of the rising Chief Fellows for the pulmonary and critical care program at Ohio State.

Shilpa Sridhar, MD:
Hi, I'm Shilpa. I am another one of the rising Chief Fellows, also an incoming third year fellow here at Ohio State. We're really excited to tell you all about our program as both Alex and I are long-term Buckeyes and have been at OSU for a while. One of the reasons we've stuck around and that we love our program is the robust clinical training that we get here. So we have six different medical ICUs.
Two of these are within our James Cancer Center and four are in our University Hospital. So the ones in the James see primarily patients with malignancies and the ones in University Hospital see all comers with critical care needs. We, because of this volume, have robust procedural training as well. We do a lot of vascular procedures like centralized and A-lines, but we also do a lot of pulmonary specific procedures like intubation, bronchoscopy, and chest tubes.

And the latter we do all of those ourselves, both intubations and our own chest tubes. We spend time on two different consult services and we see patients both in the James as well as in our Ross Heart Hospital. So we spend a lot of time doing multidisciplinary collaborative care with other primary teams and consultants and some very complex patients. We also have our own clinics as fellows and we see everything from pulmonary nodules to COPD to rare cystic lung diseases in our clinics. We also have subspecialty clinics that our fellows spend time in to kind of personalize their experience here. Those range from ILD clinics to a vasculitis clinic to transplant clinic as we are a large transplant center here as well. And all of these experiences really allow people to tailor and personalize their own career paths.

Alex Wong, MD:
And really that's been something that's surprised me even as someone who's been at Ohio State for a long time is the kind of individualized aspect and the strength of the career development that's here at Ohio State. Fellowship is a little bit of a unique experience at least for me in that there's not like a clear next step. There's not the next match to get to. And instead, you're building out what your career is going to be.

And Ohio State really supports that. They support fellows in discovering what their career might look like while also finding ways to make them successful in the future. Part of that is through our track system. We have five different tracks that fit a variety of different career paths from like an academic clinician to a researcher to working in community settings to medical education.  And these tracks really provide the time, space, and mentorship to be successful in those different career paths. But again, it's much more individualized than that and the tracks are really more just guidelines. There's a lot of focus on the individual fellow and in fitting their needs and finding what needs to happen for that fellow to be successful in the future.

Shilpa Sridhar, MD:
And mentorship is a really key piece to that career development as well. And the mentorship I've received as a fellow here really has allowed me to turn my kind of rough ideas of what I wanted for my career as I went from residency into fellowship really into a foundation for an academic career going forward. We are a very large institution with a very robust pulmonary division as well and that allows us to get mentorship from people with a wide variety of expertise, but also allows us to work with those people to personalize and carve out our own niche as a pulmonary and critical care physician. We typically have multiple mentors for each fellow ranging from scholarly mentors and more traditional research type paths, but also clinical mentors and mentors in fields like medical education or global health or other things that are not maybe as traditional.

Alex Wong, MD:
Outside of the amazing opportunities that are here at Ohio State, Columbus is actually really a fantastic city to live in. It's one of the fastest growing cities in the country and I think that really shows that people want to live here. I really love Columbus. It's part of the reason I've been here for 12 years now. It's got the perfect mix of a lot going on, but at the same time being a very accessible city that's pretty easy to get around.

And like I said, there's tons of stuff going on all the time. Festivals, street events, concerts from big names to small venues, sports, there's professional sports and then college sports obviously as well. The Ohio State football team is always a really fun experience to go see. But even like other college sports, like the Women's Hockey Team here is incredible. The most recent Winter Olympics team actually had 12 Ohio State players on it. So those games are really fun to go to, too. 

And even outside of sports, there's other things to do as well. Even just exploring the city and seeing the vast variety of different neighborhoods and unique charms of the city that exists is really a fun part of exploring the city. And then finally, the food here is absolutely incredible. Columbus is a test market for the United States. So we get a lot of unique new restaurants, chains, food items that come before they've been anywhere else, which is a fun thing to try out.

Shilpa Sridhar, MD:
And one of the best parts of our program is that you actually get time to explore the city and experience all of those things that Alex was talking about. So work-life balance is a very high priority for our program's leadership and it really shows in how they've designed our schedule and structured our program. We have a night float system. We do not do any 24 hour call. We do not take home calls.
So while working and while you're here, that time is intense, but the time at home is really meant for you to spend with your family, with your friends, and with your co-fellows. 

And speaking of co-fellows, people like Alex and all of our other co-fellows in our class are really great humans and we just want to hang out with each other. Other classes as well are also really fantastic and we spend a lot of time with each other outside of work. Whether it is just venting about a tough day or whether it's someone needing a pet sitter at last minute notice, we really do come through for each other and one of the best parts about our program. Multiple fellows here are parents, whether that's to pets or to human children. And I think our program leadership is very supportive of having families and really having a life outside of work.

Alex Wong, MD:
I hope that we've both shown you that we really love this program and we enjoy living in the city of Columbus and we're very excited that you're considering this program for pulmonary and critical care fellowship.

[Text on screen: Thank you! We hope to see you soon.]