I think the 13-year-olds posing as attendings need to step it up a notch. “Attending” just doesn’t move the needle on this site anymore, I want “chairmen of neurosurgery at top university” calling me a wus from now on.
“Wuss.” -Chair of all neurosurgery programs in the universe, except the low tier ones.
Residents from a middle-tier SW program here. There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding Stanford, so I'll write this up in the hope of clearing the air a bit. The fact of the matter is, Stanford has a great name, top-notch research, world-renowned faculty, and good operative training and clinical training to churn out good neurosurgeons and potentially-great scientists. Their new hospital is amazing from everything I've heard. However, the culture is a bit sour and unnecessarily passive with the residents being a mixed bag. On the scale of nerdy-to-bro, they're 80% nerd, 20% bro (give or take). Ultimately, very few people are turning down a Stanford interview and Stanford is certain on who they want. Doing a sub-I there plays no role in whether you're invited for an interview, which is why you'll hear multiple stories of students who rotated in cohorts of 3-5 students at a time and 0-1 of those students receiving invites. What that should tell you is, if you want to interview at Stanford and you're a top applicant (2/3 of the following: top school name, Ph.D., and/or 30+ pubs), or have personal connections to the department, who really wants to match there, then go for it, because you'll likely get an interview anyways. But if you're from a middle-to-lower tier program, don't have much basic science work, or a ton of clinical pubs, then you'll only be rotating at Stanford for the letter and the 1-month experience. You're better off rotating at a different west coast program where rotating there matters and you can rank it come rank list time.
I have not been to Stanford, but I’ve heard from enough people with firsthand experience that the clinical training there is not good, like multiple residents scrubbed to watch an attending do burrholes. Odds are if you’re the kind of applicant Stanford is looking to match you will probably have a stellar academic career in spite of any deficiencies in clinical training, but if you’re an otherwise strong applicant, I would not lose any sleep over not getting a Stanford interview.
Stanford is trash! Just look at the interns they matched. One is an oddball from MGH/HMS, other is a WUSTL graduate who had some HHMI research fellowship but has 4 pubs (1 erratum, 1 non-first author clinical paper with 50 authors, 1 review article and 1 trash article from undergrad) and then a home student.
Plases like Stanford, MGH, UCLA only want the pedigree and not quality residents. Steer away from these places. They are terrible program with shit clinical training and with only a brand.
Moderators please remove the posts with ad hominem attacks on interns
