"The cohesive, supportive atmosphere at Duke Psychiatry is very important to me. You go through periods when you spend more time with your colleagues than you do with your spouse, so you'd better get along with them."

Why psychiatry?
"I knew I was going to be a doctor and spend my life learning the sciences, so I thought I'd do something different in college. I majored in philosophy, which intensified my interest in the mind. When I did my psychiatry rotation, it seemed to pull together all my various interests, and I fell in love with it."

Why Duke?
"My wife is also a physician, and Duke was at the top of our list because it has so many well-represented disciplines. In terms of quality of life, it was the best of all the places we looked at. But what really struck me was the residents themselves. Other schools where I interviewed would carefully select a handful of residents for you to meet. But Duke Psych invited us to have pizza at a local restaurant with 20 or so residents, and even gave us all the residents' home phone numbers. That openness and honesty really impressed me. I didn't realize how important Duke's cohesive, supportive atmosphere would be to me. But you go through periods when you spend more time with your colleagues than you do with your spouse, so you'd better get along with them."

Why the Duke psychotherapy curriculum is much more than smoke and mirrors
"In our family therapy program, which all of us rotate through in the third year, everything is done through a one-way mirror. The professor and a team of fellow trainees watch you do therapy with your assigned family all year, recording their comments on audiotape during each session so that you can go back and listen to their take on what you did. You also meet with your supervising therapist after each therapy session, and it's very revealing. To be a good therapist you have to understand the things you bring to the table, and it all comes out in those meetings."

How a consultation rotation boosted his confidence
"In one of our second-year rotations, residents consult to medically ill patients in the hospital--for example, patients who get suicidally depressed after a heart attack. The interface between medical and psychiatric illness is a complicated place to be, and I was scared of it. But the attendings were so talented that they made it one of the best learning experiences in the residency. By the end of that rotation, we felt we felt we really had achieved skills we didn't have before."

How to get the most out of the program
"Some residents know exactly what they're going to do from the first day, but most of us are still finding our way. So when something strikes you as interesting, find the people that are doing that thing and see what it's all about -- not just through formal elective options, but by developing informal, collegial relationships that will help you learn more."