 Hello, I'm Dr. May Blanchard. I am the Program Director for the OB-GYN Residency Training Program here at the University of Maryland. University of Maryland is an exceptional place to do your residency and a wonderful place to train. We expose our residents to the full breadth and depth of the field of obstetrics and gynecology. Our residents get experience from day one under direct supervision and oversight of our faculty. The residents also are wonderful support to each other in that they learn from each other, junior residents learning from their senior residents as well as their faculty, and they progress throughout four years of training, gaining, increasing, experience, skills, and the ability to practice independently. The University of Maryland OB-GYN Residency Program is based at the University of Maryland Medical Center and our secondary site is Mercy Medical Center, a community urban hospital just one mile away. These two institutions provide a wide array of exposure to both normal and very sick patients and the ability to then differentiate as that very well patient suddenly becomes very sick, which can occur in a matter of moments. Our residents gain the acumen and the clinical judgment to be able to be vigilant to evaluate those patients and be able to take care of them regardless of what their socioeconomic status is, their prior comorbidities, their exposure or lack of exposure to care, and we care for our patients regardless of their ability to pay. There's a lot of pathology that our residents are exposed to and consequently they are real advocates for their patients and being able to gain the best experience they can. Our residency program is also really strengthened by a faculty who is so invested in the training of our residents and really helping them to grow and develop into competent, independent OB-GYNs. I often say they make my job easy because I have a very invested faculty who are so willing to help the residents grow as physicians, to grow in their clinical skills, to grow in their surgical skills, to grow as researchers, and to grow to really be able to care for their patients in the best possible way. Our program is also very adaptable and certainly we saw this during the unfolding COVID pandemic that occurred. Of course we were impacted by the halting of elective surgeries, but we were subsequently able to introduce a tiered work schedule for the residents so that they were able to work both from home as well as in the hospital and subsequently learning and education did not stop. I will say our institution was so supportive and our department was very focused on making sure that our residents and our faculty were safe. We always had very ample personal protective equipment and fortunately all of our physician faculty and residents have remained intact during this crisis, but ultimately education did not suffer because of our focus on education in our program. I've been the program director for 12 years and have seen a lot of changes. We expanded from a residency program of 24 to 28 and recently to 30 and this really attests to the surgical and educational experience that our institutions afford both at university and at Mercy. In addition we have our additional GYN surgical sites of University of Maryland Midtown Campus and the VA Baltimore Medical Center and all of the surgical experiences that we had available to us really demonstrated to the ACGME the educational and clinical experiences that were going not fully fully capitalized on by the residents. In addition our expansion allows us to be able to even better comply with the duty hours so we were really pleased to be able to get that expansion early this year and we matched our first class of eight residents who started this fall. So normally I would say come to University of Maryland you will get to see what we're all about in person but of course we're not in normal times right now but take a look at our website, our Instagram and talk with the residents and the faculty on interview day. I think you'll agree with me that there's no better place to start your career as an OBGYN than here at the University of Maryland.