Session 21

General Surgery is gaining in popularity, which shows in its competitiveness for residency. You need to be on the top of your game to match. And similar to Internal Medicine, it is the gateway to a lot of subspecialties.

As we're presenting the data here, remember that this is not just for those looking to be general surgeons their whole life but those who are looking into other subspecialties which we will be featuring here on the podcast in the future such as Surgical Oncology, Colorectal Surgery, Surgical Critical Care, Minimally Invasive Surgery, etc. There are certainly a lot of things you can go on and do after your general surgery residency.

The 2017 NRMP Main Match Data is now available since the match happens in March of every year.

[01:45] Total Number of Programs and Applicants

For General Surgery, there are a lot of physicians available with 267 programs around. There are 236 Psychiatry residencies and 204 Pediatric residencies so that gives you an idea that there are more general surgeons than pediatrics. There are 241 OB/GYN residencies so there are a lot of surgical residencies.

General Surgery has two categorical residency programs. A categorical program is one where you apply to the program from medical school and that's where you're going to do your five years of General Surgery residency. Then there are prelim surgery positions and there are more prelim surgery positions than there are categorical.

Somebody doing a surgical prelim can do it because they're going into a surgical subspecialty straight out of medical school and they're required to do their PGY-1 year separate from their categorical residency.  In this episode, I will only tackle the full five-year categorical surgery programs consisting with 267 programs for categorical surgery.

Out of 267 programs, there are 1,281 spots. There are almost 5 spots at each program. Interestingly, there are not a ton of U.S. Seniors applying for these categorical programs. And out of these spots, there were only 1,383 that applied and 2,388 total applicants. For the purposes of this data, U.S. Seniors equals Seniors at an allopathic (MD) medical school. Hence, this does not include graduates of an MD medical school. These are only students who are still in school. Those who took some time off to do some research or didn't match the first time are not included in the U.S. Seniors data. There were 3 unfilled programs which means a lot of of people are matching with 99.6% of the spots filled.

I want to briefly mention that if you don't match in a categorical spot, it's typically pretty easy to do a Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program (SOAP), which used to be called Scramble. There are only 61.7% of those spots were filled. So it's very easy to do a SOAP into a program if you don't match in a surgical program.

But assuming your stats are decent and you're a good person, you're probably going to match because it's not overly competitive for U.S. Seniors which is interesting.

[06:55] Types of Applicants

Table 2 of the 2017 NRMP Match Data breaks down the types of applicants for each specialty. For categorical surgery, there were 1,281 positions and there were 1,276 were filled. So there were 5 empty spots and 3 programs that went unfilled.

Out of the 1,276 filled positions, 1,005 were U.S. Seniors while 74 were U.S. Grads (students that either didn't match the first time or didn't apply because they were doing research or something else. Total number of U.S. Seniors (allopathic MD students) was 1,079 out of the 1,276 positions. The rest of it was filled by 64 osteopathic students and 62 U.S....