Surgical educationMedical student operative experience correlates with a match to a categorical surgical program
Section snippets
Methods
Medical students at the University of Wisconsin are required to keep a log of all operations observed during their 8-week third-year surgical clerkship. Students at our institution are assigned randomly to one of five surgical rotations, and have no ability to request one rotation over another in their third year. Most students spend 4 weeks on one of three University based general surgical services: the “Blue” service, which consists primarily of surgical oncology patients; the “Orange”
Demographic data
Of the 146 medical students included in the review, 40% were female. All students spent equal time on the third-year surgery clerkship: 4 weeks on general surgery and 4 weeks on the surgical subspecialty services. These students subsequently matched to residency training programs in March 2000. Of the 146 medical students, 9 matched to a categorical general surgery program, 13 to a surgical subspecialty field (ENT, orthopedics, urology), and the remaining 124 matched to other nonsurgical
Comments
This study was undertaken to determine if exposure to surgical cases in medical school influences future career choices. The results are interesting given the significant decline in match rates for surgical residencies over the past 5 years (NRMP data). We find that despite observing similar numbers of total operations, students do experience differences in operative exposure in their surgical clerkship.
Certain numbers of students, prior to their third-year clerkship, will have expressed an
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