Competitiveness

[Guest]

How competitive is neurosurgery? The field is difficult and so not many applicants overall. But chance/percentage wise how is it compared to plastics/ortho/derm?

[Guest]

Neurosurgery is less competitive than the specialties you list plus ENT and Ophtho. Probably less competitive than IR, vascular surg and CT surgery too. Takes a special kind of person to be a neurosurgeon. Need to be able to handle failure well.

[Guest]

Less competitive in terms of the numbers/stats? or the quality of applicants? I feel that neurosurgery has the highest number of publications

[Guest]

It's often marginally less competitive in terms of the match % than some of the specialties mentioned above, but often requires more in terms of academic productivity. Discussions of competitiveness across many of these subspecialties are pretty worthless as they're all within the same ballpark in terms of board scores etc (even more so now with pass/fail probably) and in order to be competitive you will have to have a track record of academic productivity and faculty mentorship in a given field, so it's usually a decision made years in advance of when you actually apply.

[Guest]

Just a medical student so take with a grain of salt. I think Neurosurgery is more competitive than IR and vascular (unlike the former poster) but less competitive than plastics, ENT, derm, ortho, CT integrated. Also less competitive than optho and maybe urology but realistically around that ballpark. Someone with more insight please correct me if I am wrong.

[Guest]

Its self selecting. People do PhDs to try to match into a good program (not smart but you get the point). Within the applicant pool there are some of the most exceptional med students. So, competition among the few MS4s (few hundred) that apply to neurosurgery is fierce, but the applicant pool for these other specialties is relatively much larger. People applying to Ophtho etc apply to IM etc as backup. Not usually the case in neurosurgery.

[Guest]

The same can be said of plastics, ENT, derm, etc. They are all self-selecting in the sense that in order to even be competitive enough to apply, you need a track record of strong academics and research productivity.