[Dr. Handcox]
I really could not have picked a better
place for my training.
[Dr. Lathrop] 
This is absolutely a place where people who want to do well can thrive.
[Dr. Munoz]
This is definitely a supportive environment.
[Chelsea Easley]
I know that it's, it's a place where I feel welcome it's a place where I belong.
[Dr. Sontag]
It's nice to know
that you can come to a place and find your home.
[Dr. Handcox]
It's a fantastic teaching
place, fantastic hospital. I love it!
[Dr. Khan] I don't think I could see myself doing
anything else.
[Dr. Bakouetila]
I feel like I've made a great decision coming here.
So for anybody who comes to visit this campus,
what they will immediately grasp is the
energy in the place. It's hard to put it
into words,
but when you're here you can actually
feel it, it's palpable.
[Victoria Garza] 
The culture here is welcoming, it's a
gigantic family. Everyone wants their
neighbor to succeed.
There's not a culture of competition here;
collaboration is really what everyone strives for.
The students here are all
committed to creating this environment
so that we all can be great physicians
in the future.
[Dr. Henrich]
I've never seen anything like this where the students lift each other up and help each other.
The mutually supportive atmosphere among all
of our students, all of our trainees is
complemented by a faculty that has
embraced this.
Some institutions that are really large, you kind of get lost in that.
But here you have intimate relationships with the faculty and
they're really there to support you and mentor you.
[Dr. Henrich]
Students who come to the Long School of Medicine
will find incredibly supportive culture.
I feel like the Long School of Medicine is very diverse.
You can find people from anywhere, everywhere.
Every color, age, background, where they grew
up, socioeconomic.
And I think they really stressed that
there is richness in in having that sort
of experience coming from everybody.
There's been science to document that
more diverse research teams are, the more
diverse your workplace settings are, the
greater innovation that comes out of
that diversity. Simply put is that we
need to reflect our given society today.
Our patient population is going to be diverse
so getting to learn that now and
appreciate it and respect it just sets it
up to be such a natural transition as we
become physicians.
[Dirk Wristers]
I think the culture here is something that's been fostered
over tons of years.
It has a lot to do with our faculty.
[Dr. Henrich]
It's completely
congruent with the culture of this city.
[Victoria Garza]
San Antonio has such a unique culture
and it's so rich in its culture and its
history. And that's one thing I feel I
have never gotten in other big cities in Texas.
[Dr. Henrich]
You're immediately accepted. The
smiles are warm and friendly, people
immediately reach out to you to welcome
you.
[Dr. Sontag]
I fell in love with the food and the culture.
I'd never had homemade flour
tortillas before coming to San Antonio
and they are unmatchable. They don't have
them where I'm from.
[Chelsea Easley]
There's a lot of different options for fun things to do
in San Antonio. There's different parks
just like city parks with running and
jogging trails, but really within driving
distance there are several nature parks.
You know the loop canyons and the rivers
different things to do very close.
[Dr. Handcox]
All the restaurants you could want clubs, bars;
everything is right there at our
fingertips. And then 20 more minutes
north you're out in the hills again and
the wilderness.
And you kind of hear about that southern hospitality but coming
here and actually seeing is what made me make the decision to stay here.
[Dr. Lathrop]
It's a great city for raising families. It's affordable, the public schools are
good, there's lots of fun things to do with your family here.
I'd say the mission of our curriculum
design is to provide the foundation that
any doctor is going to need. We need to
make sure that that's there first and foremost.
So about seven years ago, we
completely revised our curriculum here
at the Long School of Medicine. We call
it the "CIRCLE curriculum" because every
single clinical principle goes back to
an underlying human physiologic function,
goes back to an underlying gene function.
We connect everything in human health
from emotions to diseases to cells to
genes in one circle. We unify to make it
more understandable for the medical
student.
[Dr. Henrich]
And each year in the curriculum, everything you go through gets
more and more interesting and the more that you get a chance to see
actual people and work with them, it becomes thrilling to see something work.
[Dr. Hromas]
We introduce medical students early on to patients because they need to know
the diseases that are studying make a difference to individual humans.
[Chelsea Easley]
It's crazy to think
even in my first semester here at
the Long School Medicine I have that
opportunity to really help people, which
is a really exciting experience for a
first-year, second-year medical student.
[Dirk Wristers]
The programs that this school has
empower students to go out into the
community and learn firsthand how to
treat patients of vulnerable populations
and how to work with people who've had a
little bit of a rough go in life.
[Dr. Hromas]
So for both our residents and our medical students, our two partner
hospitals are University Health System and the Veterans Administration Hospital,
and they're both wonderful hospitals.
They serve different populations that
complement each other so you as a
medical student or resident will get the
largest possible experience. You'll see
diseases that are very far along and
you'll prevent diseases. You'll learn
about both prevention
and treatment of the worst possible
stage of a particular disease in the
field you're interested in.
I would say
that we have hospital based programs, we
have medically based programs, and
surgically based programs and each and
every one of them is outstanding. And we
have other key other relationships, which
includes the Mays Cancer Center, and we
also rotate a significant number of our
trainees through the military training
centers here in the city. In fact we
train in a remarkable variety of
locations, which I think again
distinguishes us from many other
institutions.
[Dr. Henrich]
Long School of Medicine is moving forward in all directions.
Now there are over 300 million dollars of
research on the campus, the practice plan
is growing at 10 percent per year, the
research is growing at 10 percent per
year, the students and the faculty are
voting with their feet, in that they're
flocking here. They see what we have here.
And they want to be here to be a part of
it. So if you want to be trained in the
very best way, this is a great place to
come. But if you want to do it in an
atmosphere that is a no-kidding, sincere,
authentic, 'we care about you' atmosphere,
then this place has that too.
