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I heard a rumor today about ways to enhance your chances of getting into a surgical residency:
The head and neck portion of gross anatomy is extremely important to do well on. They want to know how you scored on those tests (written and lab practical)and whether or not you were on the dissection team and how you did. In addition, to spend a summer doing prosections is good too.
What do you all think about this?
Sorry for posting in the medical students section, I really do appreciate a med students only section but I can not let this rumor be propogated without pointing out a few things. First of all how would any residency program know what your test scores on the head and neck portion of anatomy were anyway? Programs only have access to your final anatomy grade in the form of your transcript. I interviewed 18 different places, was offered interviews at 33 of the 35 places I applied and was NEVER asked anything about head and neck (it just isn’t critical for general surgery or any other surgical specialty OTHER than ENT, ophtho or neurosurg.) Now I’m not denying that anatomy is important, after all your whole career will be based on it. As far as doing extra dissections it may come in handy for your own learning and knowledge base, but it would be far more useful to find someone that would let you scrub in the OR, after all the live anatomy looks far different than post-mortum anatomy and the contacts that you make (in the form of letters of recommendation-surgery is a fairly small world) will serve you far better. Also, you can get a better handle on the names of the surgical instruments and the “etiquette” of the OR from being in there, not in the anatomy lab.
I have a powerpoint presentation that I give to various group of medical students that are plannng on applying in surgery (or a surgical subspecialty). If you want a copy PM me and I’d be happy to send it to you!
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