UW has long offered many incentive programs for students to return back to state following their education, and WWAMI is one of the programs aimed toward medical students.
WWAMI is an acronym for the five states that participate in the program, including Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho. Students from these five states are offered discounted med school rates with the opportunity to attend schooling, clinical and residency in medical facilities in locations spread throughout the other states.
“We’re taking Wyoming residents, trying to encourage them to think about medicine, stepping into our program and helping to make sure they find ways to get back to the state, it’s a successful approach,” Marivern Easton, acting director of the Wyoming WWAMI program, said. “Students that come from Wyoming are the ones who are most likely, not only to practice in Wyoming, but to stay in Wyoming.”
The first year for Wyoming students is spent in the classrooms at UW. Following this year of classes, the students then travel to Seattle, Washington to attend the University of Washington for a semester to continue their education. Then, students are drawn to go to the many locations scattered throughout the five participating states, where they do their clinical and residency.
“I think [going to Seattle] was one of the best experiences there is, because a lot of people from Wyoming visit big areas, but we don’t exactly live in them,” Geringer said. “Living in a city is a lot different than living in Wyoming, so you learn a lot and realize there’s a lot more out there than Wyoming.”
Geringer has finished his classes, and is currently in the residency stage of WWAMI. He was in a special program of it, however, that only sent him to Wyoming and Seattle, but most students travel throughout the five states.
“I was pretty happy to come back [to Wyoming], but it was definitely an experience that I wish everybody could experience,” Geringer said. “It’s the same vice versa, a lot of people from Seattle are getting to come out to Wyoming and see what it’s like to be in a smaller area not surrounded by people, so it’s a good exchange.”
Wyoming students can sign a contract that allows them to pay around $13,000 a year for medical school if they agree to return to Wyoming after residency to practice for at least three years in the state. If the students decide to not return to Wyoming, they are required to reimburse the school for the difference in tuition at the University of Washington. According to current numbers on the UW (Washington) Medicine website, the total cost of medical school attendance is around $55,000 per year, which means that students can save up to $42,000 a year by going through the program and returning to Wyoming to practice medicine.
“The data tells us that you are most likely to have physicians return to their state of residence, so most programs that are successful make efforts to recruit students into their medical school programs, and then make every effort to retain them,” Easton said.
The program currently has a 72.8 percent return rate to Wyoming, and since the program’s creation in 1997, 119 Wyoming residents have obtained their degree through the program and 83 have returned to Wyoming to practice.
Geringer is currently in residency in Wyoming and is leaning toward practicing pulmonary critical care, and plans to return to the southeastern corner of the state to practice medicine.
“I want to be back in the Cheyenne, Laramie, southeast WY, northern Colorado area,” Geringer said. “I want to stay [in that area] for awhile. It’s tough because depending on what specialty you do, there’s a limited number of jobs to sustain you.”
Geringer also mentioned that the program allowed him a great deal of hands on experience while practicing in Wyoming.
“A lot of med schools have you do the clinical rotations within the city that the med school is in, so you’ll talk to a lot of medical students from other areas that are only practicing in big centers,” Geringer said. “In the Laramie program, we have to get out and practice in smaller areas where we’re kind of the only med student around, and we get a lot of hands on experience and see what we’ll be doing when we come back to Wyoming, because that’s the end goal for the program is to send doctors out to the small areas.”
