tia

I think there's about 650 spots per year.

Andrew, did you do a preliminary or transitional year prior to your first year of ophthalmology? How did you "bide your time" until you were finally a PGY-2 in ophtho?


Jason Park MS-IV
NSU-COM

Are there "easy" spots to get into, like community programs or something if all you want to do is optho? I was talking with an ophthamologist yesterday, and she made it sound like a lot of fun so I was thinking that I should consider it. Can someone tell me if I would be competetive enough to match too? I got straight B's during my pre-clinical years, research that never went anywhere in cardiology (never got started), 230 on step I, and so far, 2 B+'s in peds and ob/gyn. She is over at Hopkins and she told me that even there, they have people who are klutz's with their hands and pick non-surgical specialties.

Hi,

I did a preliminary year in medicine at the U of Iowa. Busy but Loved it!

CKent, I don't think there are any "Easy" spots for ophtho. It's fairly competitive across the board. However, looks like your numbers are average for the matched candidate. Give it a shot, and see how it goes.

I'll be doing a preliminary year as well. I am looking forward to being busy as well. It seems that 4th year was almost like a vacation year. Don't get me wrong...I still worked hard and learned alot. However, it was nothing like the hours I endured during my third year. How are the hours so far as a PGY2??

650 seems like a fairly large number of spots for such a specialized field. Does this mean that a good overall applicant should have a great chance to match somewhere in optho? Anybody have any estimates of the number of applicants in the pool this season?

There are only about 430 spots a year. In the mid-late 90's, there were approximately 510 spots a year. The number of positions have been gradually reduced, but I believe it has been stable now for the past few years. It kinda sucks for the applicants that the number of spots have decreased; but it actually is a good thing, as there were really a number of subpar programs.

Sorry about the mistype. There are about 450 spots a year. www.sfmatch.org used to published the match statistics, but they took down this info a while back.

PGY-2 will depend on where you match. Some places are very busy with Q4Day and in-house call. At Iowa, I'm on call 4 times a month with home call.