Best neighborhoods for general surgery resident at Stanford?

March 17, 2007 12:12 PM

The Residency Match takes us from the East coast to Stanford, and I was wondering if I could get some suggestions with regards to accomodation (1br or equivalent) taking into account rates vs neighborhoods most accessible to the core hospitals (University Hospital, VA Palo Alto, Kaiser Foundation, and Santa Clara Valley Medical Center) in terms of traffic conditions. Thanks.
posted by banderivec to Education (3 answers total)

Best answer: It completely depends where you'll spend most of your time. SCVMC is way the hell away from the first three, which are all more or less centered around the actual Stanford campus. Menlo Park is closest to the university clinic, but can be pretty spendy. There's some decent stuff south-east of campus, more over by Page Mill. The cheaper apts seem mostly to be in Mountain View in the area, which will be pretty far away from the university hospital, decently far away from Kaiser, but reasonably close to VA Palo Alto. As a frame of reference, even at rush hour, Mountain View to the stanford clinic should only take you ~ 20-25 minutes. El Camino gets crowded but moves pretty well. To get to Santa Clara, taking 280 will be infinitely more pleasant than 101, and quite possibly faster. CalTrain also heads down there, so you could get away with public transit as well.

For that matter, Stanford's marguerite (free shuttle) has a route that goes from the clinic to VA, and the A line takes you pretty close to Cal Ave.
posted by devilsbrigade at 12:34 PM on March 17, 2007

Congratulations on your match!

Have you contacted the Stanford House Staff Office with your questions? They were originally founded, according to their web page, "to assist in finding local accommodations for house officers in the Palo Alto area." So you should probably just do what they tell you to do.
posted by ikkyu2 at 12:50 PM on March 17, 2007

I took a contract job in Palo Alto a few years ago and found all of my temporary housing on craigslist. I also found the apartment I ended up moving into permanently on there. It's a good resource.
posted by miss lynnster at 4:53 PM on March 17, 2007