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My name is Jay Raman.
I am professor and chief of urology
here at Penn State Health.
I've been here for 12 years.
We're an academic medical center,
but we are predominantly in a rural environment.
And the closest major hospitals and academic medical centers
are about 75 to 90 miles away.
So what's great about our training is
that being part of a large health system,
we get all of our referrals from within our own practice.
We're the tertiary and ordinary care referral
for the community practices.
What's really unique about our program
is the blend, a blend of general urology,
a blend of subspecialty trained urology,
and also a spectrum of disease so that trainees get exposure,
not only to minimally invasive surgery,
but also open techniques.
My name is Suzanne Merrill, and I
am an associate professor of urologic oncology
and the program director of our urology residency.
I have been here since 2015--
so now just starting my sixth year.
As a program director, my focus has
been to make sure resident education
and their well-being is central to our mission as a division.
And because of this, we have all really
been focused on creating a very comprehensive
educational curriculum.
And this incorporates faculty given didactics
according to their subspecialty expertise
and also draws from other areas of medicine,
such as interventional radiology, medical oncology,
nephrology, and radiation oncology.
So we get the expertise from those staff as well.
I'm Ross Decter.
I'm the professor of urology.
And I head the division or group at least of pediatric urology.
I've been here at Penn State Health,
just got a note in the mail, for 33 years as it turns out.
So I'm the oldest member of our division of urology.
The preceptorship model is essentially
a one-on-one learning experience.
So when a resident is with me, they're with me the whole day.
Every day some of my cases may be
more suitable for a senior resident as opposed
to very junior resident.
So there'll be days when a senior resident, the junior
swamp out, but I may only be working
with two residents at a time.
They see the patient pre-operatively in the clinic.
They do the surgery with you.
They see the patient post-operatively.
There's very good longitudinal follow-up.
It also allows us, because of more intense contact with them,
to assess their capabilities and allow
them to do more once we feel that they're competent enough
to do it.
From a resident perspective, it's
positive because they're doing more earlier.
And from a faculty perspective, it's
positive, because we have a better assessment
of their capabilities.
My name is Dr. Adrian Sosenko.
And I am a fourth year urology resident here at Penn State.
I did four sub-I's as a fourth year medical student.
It has some really big programs, top ones in the country.
And one thing I noticed was that there isn't a residency program
that's got camaraderie like ours.
We come in as friends, and we leave as best friends.
We go to each other's weddings, hang out all the time.
We all support each other.
The variety of different kinds of cases,
there's definitely no shortage.
And we have fellowship trained attendings who love to teach.
And multiple attendings of ours win
awards every single year for teaching students,
teaching residents.
To be honest, I couldn't imagine doing residency
in a big city like Chicago, New York, Boston.
I would be rounding probably at 2:00
AM if I was living in a major city because of the commute.
It's definitely a program that's up and coming on the rise.
We work hard.
And we make sure people around the hospital
know that we do work hard.
And we have a sense of pride with our residency.
My name is John Knoedler.
I'm an associate professor of surgery
and the division of urology at Penn State Health.
I'm also the associate program director
of the urology residency at the hospital.
I've been at Penn State Health for three years on faculty,
but I was originally a medical student here.
Hershey, Pennsylvania is, I think,
a little bit of a hidden gem.
It is small enough to make your time and residency easy.
And while it's nice to have some of the amenities of a big city,
residency is a busy time.
And having affordable living and easy access to your work-life
and your home life is valued.
That said, it's close enough to get away to bigger places,
whether that's the New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia,
Hershey is a destination town.
There's a lot of venues that come through,
be that cultural events, music, dining,
and those sorts of things.
And it makes it a good diversion on your time away
from the hospital.
I left after medical school.
And I came back here intentionally,
because it's a wonderful place to live.
And I enjoy it.