Message from the General Surgery Residency Program Director
Dudley Benjamin Christie, III, MD, FACS
The graduating class for the academic year of 2025–2026 will hold a special place in GME history on a national scale. Our graduating chief residents will be remembered as the first recruiting class impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic era. Our chief residents adjusted to rapid, forced change and adapted new ways of scholarly accountability in their respective student environments in order to become surgery residents. Being faced with challenges, never before encountered by graduate medical education on a national scale, they succeeded.
In addition to the rigor that is inherent in surgery training, this class was challenged with establishing a new normal after the panic, integrating new technologies, satisfying new requirements for patient care delivery, overcoming staffing issues, call burdens and navigating difficulties with resource access. Staying steady, patient and committed to the department missions of high-quality patient care as well as professional and personal improvement, no challenge was left unconquered by this group. Despite all measures of difficulty encountered during their time in Macon, they succeeded.
The graduating chiefs ability to constantly evolve and adjust during transformative times during their five-year experience speaks to the lessons of resiliency that they learned during their challenges in the Covid era and the strong make up of their individual characters. Additionally, this class represents one of the highest scoring classes on the in-training examination in program history. Their scholastic achievements and scholarly contributions resound loudly on their resumes, representing not just work, but hard work done in a new era of training. While not necessarily on their resume, the leadership by example methods that they have demonstrated within this program has been a key ingredient to our program success over the last five years. Their fair, thoughtful and demonstrative leadership has elevated the department of surgery’s standards of performance and positions us to stronger in the years to come.