The University of Alberta’s Department of Ophthalmology held their CaRMS information session on November 5th for medical students in clerkship interested in Ophthalmology. There was a prepared presentation and Q&A with the program director, Dr. Carlos Solarte, and the chief resident, Dr. Maya Tong. After the presentation, participants were split into breakout and got to spend 5-10 minutes with 1-2 residents as they rotated throughout various breakout rooms. This allowed for more casual conversations amongst attendees and the residents.

A few takeaways from the discussion:

• The program is very supportive of residents who want to pursue subspecialty practice by setting them up with high impact research projects and large surgical volumes
• Past residents have also pursued graduate degrees, even in basic science, during their training
• There is a very favourable staff to resident ratio so residents have ample exposure to unique surgical cases
• The “retina retreat” was cited as a program highlight by multiple residents which is a multi-day retreat that is hosted by a number of retina faculty at UofA
• It was cited that residents only do 1 long weekend of call per year

In case you could not attend this session or had additional questions, students are invited to reach out to the UofA PGY-1’s Rahul Moorjani (moorjani@ualberta.ca) and Daisy Liu (jliu26@ualberta.ca)!

Authors: Cody Lo

Cody Lo is a 4th year medical student at UBC and is the Director of External Affairs for the Canadian Ophthalmology Student Interest Group.