Dear Prospective Applicant,
Welcome to the Penn Orthopaedics Residency program.
I understand that applying for and choosing an orthopaedic residency program is a daunting task. The next few years of your education will be critical in your development as a physician and surgeon. My goal is to help you decide if Penn is the right place for you to grow.
First and foremost, you should know that I am absolutely dedicated to providing our residents with the best orthopaedic education to be outstanding practitioners, innovative investigators and steadfast leaders in academia as well as our community at large. Education is not an afterthought, but one of the core reasons that we choose to practice at Penn.
As you find out more about us, you will learn some of the unique strengths of our department. From the diversity of our patient population (young healthy athlete to immunocompromised cancer survivor) and our practice (community joint replacement to complex tendon transfers, pelvic surgery and microsurgical limb reconstruction) to that of our research, faculty and residents, you will find great depth and breadth in training at Penn. The resources you will find are too numerous to outline here and can become overwhelming. But importantly, the faculty will serve as your role models, preceptors and mentors and they will take a personal interest in helping you utilize these resources to develop as a capable and independent physician and surgeon.
It is very important to me that you speak with our clinical faculty, research faculty, physician extenders and especially the residents about the program as you go through the application process. The residency is about them — that has been and will continue to be the tradition at Penn’s Department of Orthopaedic Surgery.
So, again, I invite you to learn as much as you can about who we are and thank you for considering Penn as your choice for residency.
Sincerely,
L. Scott Levin, MD, FACS