Thread: so i want to be a trauma surgeon

i live in CA, and dont want to leave (cept for medschool, obviously) but where should i go to school (AUC, SABA, SGU, ROSS) to have the best chance in being able to get trauma surgery residency then moving to CA and practicing trauma surgery here?

Check out each school's respective site. AUC has a match list up where you can see where people scored a residency.

While a specific goal is admirable, especially with going to a Carib school, ask yourself if you'll be happy being any other type of doctor as well.

any of the above 4 will give you about the same shot in most places. what you wanna pay attention to more closely than which if those 4 you wanna go to (they all have california approval) is the timing of your graduation, you wanna leave plenty of time to get your california letter just to be able to say you have it to match


having said that, the only thing that maybe marginally helpful is to make suree you do your surgery rotation in cali at a hospital that has at least a level II trauma center and pray you impress them enough to get an interview or at least a very good letter of recommendation. you also have to absolutely get 230+ on the usmle to even have shot at most places.


PS-don't take a pre-lim surgery slot

Originally Posted by AUCMD2006

PS-don't take a pre-lim surgery slot

Hey! Can you explain what this is, and why we shouldn't take it? (I'm not arguing, I have no idea what it is.)

catagorical surgery slot- a residency that in 5 years will lead to graduation from a surgery program and the ability to be board certified

pre-lim spots are akin to free slave labor for hospitals. it is basically an intern year (1st year od residency) in surgery without guarantees on anything. it may or may not count towards a catagorical slot, in the event that you match into a catagorical slot the hospital can use the pre-lim year to count towards your residency meaning you have to match into a 2nd year slot or the more likely event is that you'd start over as a first year. when you do pre-lim you have to apply again through the match the next year in the vast vast vast majority of cases because the majority of programs don't have any guaranteed slots for their pre-lims and the ones that do tend to be pretty hostile...imagine 3 pre-lim wannabe surgeons fighting for 1 catagorical spot?

sometimes people do 2 years of pre-lim but the same applies, you still apply through the match for a 1st year catagorical slot and loose those 2 years or try for a rare 3rd year spot. this is a bit dangerous though because you are alloted 6 years to finish residency (NOT INCLUDING FELLOWSHIP)

as an added bonus, since you are a pre-lim and not catagorical, its not mandatory for you to attend lectures, meetings etc so if there is a scheduling conflict, meetings or lectures off site, etc guess who covers the floor?

in short-try all things before taking a pre-lim spot even a research year and then re-applying would be more useful IMHO because research experince will help you in other specialties as well were as learning to deal with decubs may not...

oh and trauma is a fellowship after a 5 year surgical residency. keep your mind open, about half my class, including me, wanted surgery in first semester but things change when you see all sides of medicine...
good luck

Hey thank you for that explanation!

Assuming you do well at any of the 4 schools you listed and do well on the USMLE, you shouldn't have too much trouble getting a surgical residency. At least from AUC, plenty of people match into surgery. Last year alone, 1 person matched into neurosurgery, one into orthopedic surgery (at Mayo) and 14 into general surgery (categorical, many in university programs).

I also hope to do surgery and while I'm keeping my options open, I'm sure AUC will get me wherever I decide to go.

BTW...what are you doing AUCMD2006?

i'm in for trauma surgery or ER MD.... nothign else....

thats my love there.

Originally Posted by supernareg

i'm in for trauma surgery or ER MD.... nothign else....

thats my love there.

That means you'll probably end up in obstetrics......by choice, of course.

I thought I wanted to be a psychiatrist. I now wonder what I was thinking.

Maybe you mistook needing to go for wanting to be...