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Hi, my name's Robert Harbaugh.
I'm the chair of the Penn State Department of Neurosurgery,
and I'm glad you're interested in the Penn State Neurosurgery
Residency Program.
It's one of the best programs in the country,
and I'd like you to learn more about it.
First, it's a very busy clinical program.
We do more than 4,000 procedures a year in six new
or recently renovated operating rooms, our angiography suites,
our gamma knife radio surgery center, and an on campus
outpatient surgery center.
We're very proud that we've put together
a group of faculty and residents who are friends and colleagues.
We get along well together.
I think it's a really good group to work with.
And I can assure you, if you're a resident in this program,
you'll graduate being a good doctor
and an excellent neurosurgeon.
The neurosurgery residency program
here is one of my top choices for a number of reasons.
One of the biggest reasons is this town of Hershey.
Think it's a great place to live.
The surrounding area, Harrisburg is very close,
we're an easy day trip to Philadelphia, New York,
Baltimore, DC.
I think it's an outstanding place to live.
We have comprehensive neurosurgical care here.
Every specialty and subspecialty of neurosurgery is represented,
and we have experts in every field.
I think the quality of training you
get in terms of the number of cases,
the complexity of the cases, and your responsibility and role
in the care of those patients is really top tier.
This is a program that's not one size fits all.
If you have an interest in one thing or another,
you can really tailor your experience to that.
Since I'm interested in pediatrics,
I was really drawn to the fact that I
got to do a little bit of pediatric neurosurgery
every year.
It wasn't an isolated one-time experience.
So I could really foster that interest
and make sure it was what I wanted to do.
I recently had the opportunity to go
visit a pediatric neurosurgical hospital in Uganda,
and it was a really formative experience for me.
They're doing great work with a procedure called
endoscopic third ventriculostomy with choroid plexus cautery.
And I got to do a volume of cases
there that I would not see anywhere in the US
and learn from attending neurosurgeons who are really
experts in their field.
It's really hard to decide where you
want to go for the next seven years of your life
based on a two-day introduction, but when I was here,
I felt, one, that you had the ability
to make your residency what you want it to be.
Our neuro-oncology department is very strong
and gives you a good array of understanding throughout brain
tumors, as well as skull base tumors,
to get you the exposure you need to treat all kinds of tumors
in the brain.
Also something that sets Penn State apart
is our neuro-oncology medical division
is also within the Department of Neurosurgery,
so you get a level of understanding
you wouldn't necessarily get in other departments.
I wish I could have trained in this residency program.
The fact that there's not a hole in the program, the fact
that you can do virtually everything in neurosurgery,
the fact that we spent time teaching
the fundamental principles of our specialty
and devote serious attention to it,
setting aside an entire day, the fact that we have support
for broad research from the bench all
the way to clinical studies and translational research
in between, I think we have the capability of turning out
the kind of neurosurgeons who can be competitive for any job
that they would ever want, that will be competitive to be
nationally recognized experts in their field
and their subspecialty,
and who will be able to pursue the kind of practice
that they've always dreamed of pursuing.
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