Doing fellowship at different institution?

[HAM BERGER]

Why do neurosurgeons do fellowships at different (especially less prestigious) institutions to their residencies? What's the point of doing a fellowship if one has already done an enfolded fellowship during their residency?

[Guest]

What’s with all the prestige questions lately?

Fellowships are 100% about who you are training under and how much they will let you do in the OR. If you want to actually get better at your subspecialty you need a good mentor, they might be at UCSF or at WVU, it doesn’t matter.

The latter question had to do with CAST accreditation somewhat. Some jobs do not consider enfolded fellowships to be true fellowships. It’s also smart to diversify the number of attendings you’ve trained with. Which gets us back to our first point.

[drstrange]

Second post is spot on. When asked about fellowship, most people will reply with the name of their mentor. A "Shaffrey" fellowship carries the same weight whether it was at UVA or Duke.

CAST matters for endovascular and peds. Otherwise, the fellowship will not confer on you additional privileges at a hospital. The caveat to this is that your oral boards will be subspeciality dependent regardless of CAST (subject to change). I didn't even ask about CAST during fellowship interviews.

You're going to find that what you think of as "prestige" will change a lot over the course of your training. Fixate on learning to operate. At 2AM, it won't matter where you learned how to take out an epidural. Whether or not you can do it actually will. The correlation between the training location and ability is specious at best.

[Guest]

(04-03-2020, 01:32 PM)drstrange Wrote: Second post is spot on. When asked about fellowship, most people will reply with the name of their mentor. A "Shaffrey" fellowship carries the same weight whether it was at UVA or Duke.

CAST matters for endovascular and peds. Otherwise, the fellowship will not confer on you additional privileges at a hospital. The caveat to this is that your oral boards will be subspeciality dependent regardless of CAST (subject to change). I didn't even ask about CAST during fellowship interviews.

You're going to find that what you think of as "prestige" will change a lot over the course of your training. Fixate on learning to operate. At 2AM, it won't matter where you learned how to take out an epidural. Whether or not you can do it actually will. The correlation between the training location and ability is specious at best.

During a fellowship you only train under one mentor the whole time? Is it a bad idea to do a fellowship the same place you do you residency — why is it smart to diversify the number of attendings you work with? 

[drstrange]

For any given fellowship, there is typically one person who is the fellowship director and has the clout. There's several vascular guys at BNI, but that is still the "Lawton" fellowship just like it was the "Spetzler" fellowship before him. Almost invariably, people will tell you who the primary mentor was.

Yes. You should avoid doing a fellowship at the same institution. There's a lot of ways to approach cases, management, research, etc. Only training at a single institution will restrict your thinking and patient management style. Going to multiple places also diversifies your network within neurosurgery. That helps with subsequent job searches and what-have-you.

[balexyjnr3963]

Guys you need to google this , huge news for Corona -> "COVID20CB"



)+

[stay+butcovid-]

Hi everyone
I recently matched at LSU Shreveport. Can you give me thoughts on the program if you know about it?

Cheers

[Guest]

Congratulations on matching!