Pretty streets of Boston1. You are surrounded by lots of water, making me feel very at home in a Pacific Northwest-y type of way. Hey – I grew up on an island, water is important to me.
2. Your streets are beautiful; covered with bricks and cobblestones, lined with beautiful historical houses and modern buildings as well as trees and Narnia-esque lampposts.
3. You are a walking city and I am a walking girl.
4. You are filled with dogs, people with yoga mats and nerds (due to the high amount and caliber of Universities and Collages you boast) – my family will fit in well here.
5. You have a STELLAR Genetic Counseling program at an amazing university…..sigh, we could have a future together.
This trip to Boston was a blur. I am SO glad that I had time to explore on my last visit because I certainly didn’t this time. I left Seattle at 6:35am on Sunday. You want to see empty streets and freeways in Seattle? Drive to the airport at 4:30am on a Sunday. Side note: Husband I love you, thank you for waking up at ungodly times and driving me to the airport over and over again. I landed in Boston at 5:15pm after a quick stopover in Newark where I was VERY happy to get out of the air for an hour due to some awful turbulence at the tail end of my SEA>Newark flight.
I had rather stupidly thought I was landing in Boston at 2:45 which was actually my arrival time in Newark so I had to scrap my plan to take the subway in from the airport in order to make it to dinner with the current program students. I grabbed a cab, haggled a price, dropped my bags off at my hotel and hightailed it the few blocks to the bar where we were meeting for dinner. It is SO helpful to meet the students the night before an interview. They give you a lot more information about the program and the scoop on how to handle the interview the next day. For example, they let us know that one of the interviewers would ask us for five words to describe ourselves…not technically a tough question but it’s quite nice to have time to brainstorm before that one! I was starving and really tired of eating solo so it was great to get a good dinner along with good company and have all of my questions answered.
I think that BU is probably the strongest program I have been to yet. I literally like everything about it from the number, type and timing of rotations to how supportive the program directors are and how difficult but rewarding the classes would be. The national pass rate for the GC boards is 75% (yes I will have to take boards to become certified – yikes!), the BU graduate pass rate is 93%. These students emerge from the program truly equipped to practice with is very important to me. I also really clicked with the program directors and feel that I would definitely have the support to excel in the program while keeping a happy and healthy personal life. The only downside is the price of the program, it’s not off the charts but it is a private school so there is no hope of second year residency tuition decreases. This is the only downside that current students named but I think that I would certainly be getting the caliber of education that I would be paying for.
Boston University Medical Campus
As soon as the interview was done I walked through the rain back to the hotel to grab my bags. It is not fun to have to drag around luggage while dressed up in a suit in the POURING RAIN. It was literally raining about as hard as it can as I walked to the subway station form my hotel and my pants and suitcase were SOAKING but I was determined to save money and take the subway. The subway (called the T) was super easy and cheap and got me to the hotel very quickly. This is a city with great public transportation; most of the GC students and even the program director do not have cars. I grabbed dinner and my traditional post-interview beer (a delicious blueberry wheat) in the airport and then hopped on my 6+ hour flight home. I was SO happy to get back to Seattle and my husband and evil puppy (she has started to retaliate against my leaving so often…..one patch of carpet in our apartment has taken the brunt of this unhappiness. Two days at home and then off to Denver.
BU is an amazing school. They've been investing a lot of money in their campus in the last few years, which has a direct return to their student body (rather than socking money away in a fund like Harvard). In science & engineering they are considered on par with Harvard in the Boston area; IMO BU>Harvard in sci & eng because they have more novel cutting edge research going on (less cultural baggage & politics holding them back).
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