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- Dec 17, 2012
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I've followed this thread for a couple years, felt compelled to insert my experience:
GS @ privademic hospital
2 yrs research (PGY3/4) in peripheral nerve
Currently in hand fellowship at Kleinert
General surgeons continue to have a narrow window of opportunity into Hand. I had about 9 interview offers for fellowship. I'm 8 months into fellowship, and have had 4 reasonable interview offers for attending positions.
I think the attending job offers out there speak to the size of the window of opportunity. The ASSH job board has a fairly representative sample of the jobs out there; I'd arbitrarily guess they represent 30-50% of the current job openings. I'd estimate somewhere around 1-5% of the jobs out there are open to General Surgeons.
There are definitely many jobs out there for Orthopedic Hand Surgeons, I get notifications about ~1-2 new Ortho Hand job postings / week, all over the country, in desirable metros. I also get a similar volume of notifications for straight General Surgery jobs, even though I don't sign up for any of those notifications. My own offers (GS Hand) are either attractive jobs in college towns or less attractive jobs in bigger metros (Atlanta/NY). I know of several GS Hand Surgeons who went into solo practice because of the absence of groups that would take them.
I have a GS friend in hand fellowship and asked him if he would recommend Hand Surgery as a path for GS residents; his simple answer was "No," based on the difficulty of finding jobs after fellowship. I would answer, "only if you like Hand so much more than GS that you'd be willing to give up geographic options and pursue a career where you're always a second class citizen, in spite of a decade of training." For me, I really like Hand. =)
GS @ privademic hospital
2 yrs research (PGY3/4) in peripheral nerve
Currently in hand fellowship at Kleinert
General surgeons continue to have a narrow window of opportunity into Hand. I had about 9 interview offers for fellowship. I'm 8 months into fellowship, and have had 4 reasonable interview offers for attending positions.
I think the attending job offers out there speak to the size of the window of opportunity. The ASSH job board has a fairly representative sample of the jobs out there; I'd arbitrarily guess they represent 30-50% of the current job openings. I'd estimate somewhere around 1-5% of the jobs out there are open to General Surgeons.
There are definitely many jobs out there for Orthopedic Hand Surgeons, I get notifications about ~1-2 new Ortho Hand job postings / week, all over the country, in desirable metros. I also get a similar volume of notifications for straight General Surgery jobs, even though I don't sign up for any of those notifications. My own offers (GS Hand) are either attractive jobs in college towns or less attractive jobs in bigger metros (Atlanta/NY). I know of several GS Hand Surgeons who went into solo practice because of the absence of groups that would take them.
I have a GS friend in hand fellowship and asked him if he would recommend Hand Surgery as a path for GS residents; his simple answer was "No," based on the difficulty of finding jobs after fellowship. I would answer, "only if you like Hand so much more than GS that you'd be willing to give up geographic options and pursue a career where you're always a second class citizen, in spite of a decade of training." For me, I really like Hand. =)