Yarah Haidar, MD, in whitecoat

Dear prospective resident,

As the program director for the UCI Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery Residency, I want to thank you for your interest in our program. We are proud of our residency program, largely because of the individuals that comprise it. We truly enjoy the process of meeting and evaluating our resident applicants each year. We learned a lot in 2020 and 2021 about the virtual interview process and are looking forward to applying those lessons to the upcoming application period, which will return to in-person interviews. We are eager to get to know our applicants this year and to highlight what makes our program great.

We currently have 13 residents across the five years of training, but we expanded the residency in 2023 and are recruiting three residents per year moving forward. Our program offers a supportive learning environment created by both residents and faculty. Orange County is the sixth most populous county in the United States, and UCI is its only academic medical center. As such, trainees have the opportunity to work with an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse population. In addition to the UCI Medical Center, our program's training locations include Children’s Health of Orange County, Kaiser Permanente and the Long Beach VA Medical Center. Our residents also have the opportunity to work with volunteer faculty in private practices throughout Orange County.

Together, these experiences allow our residents to obtain a comprehensive clinical and surgical education that covers all of the core subspecialties within ENT. At UCI, there is no doubt you will be exposed to a broad variety of healthcare practice types with diverse patient populations and delivery models. We are obviously biased, but Orange County is also a pretty idyllic location to train in for five years!

We encourage you to learn more about our program via our website and by following us on X and Instagram.

Yarah Haidar, MD
Professor, Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery
Director, Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Residency Program