 My name is Pooja. I'm an intern. I am originally from New Jersey but I've been down here for quite a while. I went to med school actually at the University of Maryland. I just really love this place. Like I said, I went to med school here for the whole four years and honestly it was one of the best experiences that I've ever had working especially on medicine. I think I never knew what I wanted to do with my future career and then I just found my place and I found my people so I didn't see why I needed to leave. The faculty here are just the best humans I think. It's not that they're approachable. It's not that they're good at teaching. It's just they're great people. So I just feel like as someone who's a learner, as someone who kind of has like difficult situations to deal with, they've always got your back and they make you feel heard for sure. I think in terms of the community that we have here, I wish I got to know the interns a little better but COVID had different plans. So I think from here up they're all very cool people. But in terms of all of the senior residents, they're incredibly supportive because they've been through what we have already and they've come out of it much stronger and have a lot of great knowledge to share with us. But I would say I would even extend that all the way up to the fellows. I think the fellows here especially are just as approachable as the senior residents sometimes and I think that's a great environment to be in. I think at University of Maryland we just have such a broad spectrum of things that we could be doing because we have both the university hospital, we have outpatient clinics, Mercy which is a community hospital in the VA that it gives you people who are involved in different sources of patient care as well as different specialties. So it gives you a big range of people to choose from and I think that because all of the attendings are so approachable and great it makes it easier to kind of find your spot and get started early on. Baltimore is actually one of my favorite places in the world and that's kind of something you don't hear people say a lot. I grew up around New York City, I went to school in DC and I will tell you that I still prefer Baltimore and that's because it's a small city, it's got everything that you need. The standard of living is such that even on like a resident's salary or even as a med student everything is very affordable and you can just about do whatever you want. It has a great waterfront and so many like food options. It just makes everything easier because there aren't a lot of people there that you're fighting with to get into these places. So if you want to talk more about Baltimore you have to talk to me directly because I have too much to say. Oh wow, I think the teaching here is definitely different than you would get in other places and I'm comparing this to my experience as a medical student too. I think the medicine that's practiced here is very acute and very sometimes very complex but that just means that you're learning a lot maybe from one patient as opposed to you know requiring eight different patients to get the same baseline knowledge and I think that prepares you to be able to deal with complicated things quicker and more efficiently. So I think in that regard it's really great and our chiefs are definitely trying to get us looped in through the internet giving us lots of content to watch at home if we're not able to make it to conferences online. So I think there's a lot of options for learning that are available. I think the biggest piece of advice I have for medical students applying to residencies is you should ask when you go there or I guess if you're not going there when they ask you do you have any questions left for me it's always uncomfortable and you don't want to ask any more things because you feel like your brain is overloaded but I think it's important to ask what the experience of the intern is like because most places will tell you what the experience of the senior resident is like and that's usually very different from the intern year and sometimes you can go into somewhere and be kind of shocked that your schedule isn't the way that you thought the kind of support you're getting is not the way that you thought. So just make sure you're very specific about things because you have nothing to lose I think and you want to at least be prepared for what you're going to do.