Preliminary slots

[Plinko]

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My resident on surgery told me not to waste my time applying to prelim spots. He said that after that prelim year your chances are slim to none to pick up a general surgery residency spot. He said to only apply categorical. Can anyone tell me what the chances of getting accepted by a program out of prelim spot are? Thanks.

 

[njbmd]

Hi there,
In today's climate, it is fairly difficult to go from non-designated preliminary to categorical. From year to year, most programs are not losing categorical residents. Your best shot is at a program that has research years. These programs are able to adjust the number of reasearch years up or down to accomodate the proper number of residents. For example, if a categorical resident elects to take another year of research (good project with lots of publication potential), then another resident may come out of the research lab early to take that slot or a non-designated prelim may slide into it.

Apply to categorical residency slots if you KNOW that you want to do surgery. The percentages are not with you if you are applying to a preliminary slot hoping to go categorical. This happens but it is happening less frequently as most categorical surgery slots are filling in the MATCH and there were no huge number of PGY-2 slots open as fewer people who did match categorical are leaving their programs.

If you choose your categorical programs very carefully and interview wisely (provided you are realistic about your grades and board scores), you can probably match into a categorical slot.

njbmd 🙂

 

[Lemont]

Agreed with what njbmd said. One other thing: Although you may not necessarily go directly from a prelim PGY1 directly to a categorical PGY2, you may be allowed to start over as a categorical PGY1 at the same program. You will have to do PGY1 over again and thus lose a year, but you would then be in the categorical program. I have heard of this happening but I am not sure how often programs let their prelim PGY1 repeat PGY1 as a categorical resident.

 

[Plinko]

Thanks for the info, guys. I'm about to fire off my ERAS and just wanted to make sure that everything I had heard is correct.