AOA: 47% Derm, 39%ENT...13%IM, 7% Anesthesia. Looking at the graph in your link, there are the really competitive specialties that get up to about half AOA. The rest don't have much difference. Less that 15% includes EM, GenSurg, Path, PM&R. Just to make things interesting, there are 6% in FM who are AOA, but 8% of US seniors who were not AOA did not match. I'm guessing this is due to a backup specialty rank?
USMLE: Again clump of really competitive at the top, Plasitcs 243 Derm 240, ENT 239. Then the next tier, IM 222, GenSurg 222, EM 221, Anes 220. Really splitting hairs if you say IM is more competitve than Anesthesia.
All of the above give you some idea of competitiveness. But I like looking at just US grad info figuring that if you go to a school here, you should be able to get into a moderately competitive program without difficulty, right?
Anes: 6.2% of US Seniors did not match
IM: 2.1%
GenSurg: 10.1%
EM: 7.5 %
Derm: 39.0%
So overall, no. Anesthesia is not that competitive. It's about in the middle, similar to EM in most respects. Pretty close to IM.
Realize that not too long ago, instead of 6.2% of US Seniors not matching, it was more like 25% of spots were completely unfilled by anyone. Looking at it in that light, you see why it is called competitive. In many programs a few years ago, US grads were the exception, not the rule that they are now. I don't think IM ever had that kind of a swing, hence people say anesthesia is n ow competitive because it really wasn't for some time.
In general, I agree with the above post.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a mathematician/statistician, so going through all the numbers/data that the NRMP put out only helps on a pretty superficial level.
To gauge the competitiveness of the specialty (why we really care, exactly, I'm not sure), should we look at who doesn't match (which we would do by looking at the % of unmatched seniors), or would it make more sense to look at the average qualifications of accepted applicants via a proxy such as a USMLE score? To me, the latter seems more helpful, as the former process merely involves numbers of applicants and not their actual qualifications.
Here's why: let's break down appicants into three tiers (we love our 'tiers' on this forum..): above-average, average, and below-average. For the sake of argument, say that all of a sudden a certain field gets an influx of below-average applicants. Given a fixed number of positions available there would, obviously, be a larger number of unmatched applicants. That would not, however, indicate the field was more competitive, because theoretically an applicant from the "average" or "above-average" tiers could have easily matched into one of those spots. Therefore I would posit that using the percentage of unmatched applicants does not
necessarily reflect the competitiveness of the field - just the size of the applicant pool relative to the number of positions available.
If we look at the chart with the breakdown of average USMLE scores (I'm actually really against the over-use of USMLE scores, but it's the best we've got at this point), then fields such as Plastics or Derm are most competitive because it takes
higher qualifications to break into the field. My best guess is that more people don't try to match into those fields (or Ortho, or Rad-Onc, etc.) because they know/get advice not to. Otherwise, I think you'd see much higher percentages of unmatched applicants in those fields as well.
Anyways...I forgot where I was going with this, but perhaps all this talk about anesthesia getting competitive has more to do with more people realizing it's a great field and sending in more apps than anything else (not that all of a sudden the "top" students are swarming to gas). As was shown in the quoted post above, the average qualifications of our field fall pretty much in the middle of all specialties. We only have two years of released data (the NRMP has promised more data in 2 years) so it is difficult to gauge
exactly how that has changed, although we can surmise that it is increasing from the relative low several years ago.
Whether or not the field continues to increase in competitiveness remains to be seen. Given the comparatively large numbers in most anesthesia programs (compared to Derm, Rad Onc, etc), I would seriously doubt it ever gets
that hard to be a part of the best field in medicine.
😛
