Preliminary Surgery match

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lowblowjoebro
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Lowblowjoebro said:
There are two schools I'm looking at. I'm strongly considering going into some sort of surgical specialty so I'm looking at the surgery matches.

School A is west coast, ranked higher. 36 matches into surgery (10 of which are general, another 10 are ortho), plus 16 matches to prelim surgery.

School B is east coast; has 43 matches into surgery (13 general, 9 ortho), but not a single person in prelim surgery.

Why did one school match so many in prelim surgery, but the other matched none? Does this say anything about the school as far as reputation, advising, etc or is it simply a geographical difference?
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Just for reference, which do you think is better, lots of prelims or none?
 
Could be many things. Could be as simple as reporting differences for things like urology where they list the first year separate. Could be the people matching into advanced programs wanted a surgical prelim or had to scramble into one.

Unless you can tease out how many of those are people ONLY with surgical prelim years then it's tough to make comparison.
 
Lowblowjoebro said:
There are two schools I'm looking at. I'm strongly considering going into some sort of surgical specialty so I'm looking at the surgery matches.

School A is west coast, ranked higher. 36 matches into surgery (10 of which are general, another 10 are ortho), plus 16 matches to prelim surgery.

School B is east coast; has 43 matches into surgery (13 general, 9 ortho), but not a single person in prelim surgery.

Why did one school match so many in prelim surgery, but the other matched none? Does this say anything about the school as far as reputation, advising, etc or is it simply a geographical difference?
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First of all, looking at match lists are useless. Matching into a specific field says more about the individual applicants, their priorities as well as their academic achievements making them more or less competitive for their chosen field than it is about how well the school can put someone into a field. Basically, lots of factors outside of academics that factor into why a person chose to rank or go into a particular field, most we're not privy too.

That being said preliminary surgery is a 1 year surgical intern year that does not guarantee a 2nd year spot. Usually it's where people who could not match into a surgical subspecialty (ortho, ENT, plastcs, etc) go after graduating in order to build skill/resume and reapply. Other fields like anesthesia, radiology that are required to do a prelim year either in medicine or surgery before going on to their actual field can also pick surgery. Just remember this is different from a categorical match where you're guaranteed a spot until you graduate.

In essence, you can match into a surgical specialty from any school as long as you do well. Some schools may have high powered faculty in a field that can help you if you're not a rockstar applicant but it all boils down to how you do. So dont' rely on these match lists. They're just fun to look at but devoid of any real substance.
 
Maybe they didn't match. Maybe they're omfs. Maybe it's a prelim before another field. Who knows? Looking at match lists to determine where you should go is an exercise in futility.
 
Lowblowjoebro said:
The main thing I'm getting at is, both match lists look roughly equal except for the fact that school B has a significantly higher number of IM matches and zero prelim surg matches - my question is, does this say anything about advising at the school? I'm imagining a situation where faculty at school A encourages students to apply for prelim surg if they're interested but have lower stats, whereas at school B they say, you can't do surgery just apply to IM. I'm wondering if there's any possible validity to this speculation?
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They are giving you sound advice in the above posts as to why these data are hard to interpret and don't mean much. Just listen to the advice given since that's what you're asking for. Sure there may be "possible validity" to your speculation.... Or maybe there isn't.
 
Lowblowjoebro said:
The main thing I'm getting at is, both match lists look roughly equal except for the fact that school B has a significantly higher number of IM matches and zero prelim surg matches - my question is, does this say anything about advising at the school? I'm imagining a situation where faculty at school A encourages students to apply for prelim surg if they're interested but have lower stats, whereas at school B they say, you can't do surgery just apply to IM. I'm wondering if there's any possible validity to this speculation?
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There is exactly zero validity in that speculation. Sounds like you're not aware of what prelim or TY positions are or the circumstances under why someone would do them. Posters above have tried to explain it, but the takeaway point is that it's a completely worthless means of evaluating a school. I would even argue that match lists are a fairly worthless comparison tool too; looking at prelim matches reaches the level of comic absurdity.
 
Medical school advising is about as useful as college advising for premeds. Please find something else to worry about
 
Lowblowjoebro said:
Does this say anything about the school as far as reputation, advising, etc or is it simply a geographical difference?
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No
Lowblowjoebro said:
I think the school that has a lot of prelims is a better school as a whole, but maybe I'm wrong and the disparity in prelims is indicative of something else going on.
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No
Lowblowjoebro said:
my question is, does this say anything about advising at the school? I'm imagining a situation where faculty at school A encourages students to apply for prelim surg if they're interested but have lower stats, whereas at school B they say, you can't do surgery just apply to IM. I'm wondering if there's any possible validity to this speculation?
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No
Lowblowjoebro said:
if my concerns about student support/advising are completely unwarranted
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Yes
 
Kid.......go worry about something else. Looking at match lists to decide on a school is the worst possible way of choosing. You wanna do surg? Pick the school that has the most prestige and research power, but make sure it's not more than $50-60k more expensive than the other option. This is only relevant if it's a top school vs. other. If it's a top vs. top mid-tier vs. mid-tier or public vs. public or some other similar vs. similar, pick the cheapest one if the location is ok and never ever look back

Edit: saw your choices. USC is the clear choice over NJMS by like a thousand unless it violates the price factor I mentioned above or you would eventually want to be on the east coast (regional biases/connections are real)
 
You could also name the schools and people familiar with them could give you their impressions. Picking a school based on a single variable is doing yourself a disservice.
 
WedgeDawg said:
You could also name the schools and people familiar with them could give you their impressions. Picking a school based on a single variable is doing yourself a disservice.
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It's USC vs. NJMS. Not even a challenge here lol
 
Wolf3D said:
It's USC vs. NJMS. Not even a challenge here lol
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Oh my bad, didn't catch that. I would go with price and location over other things. USC has more name recognition and "prestige" and a stronger attached hospital, but it's not like NJMS is a bad school. Don't read into the match lists too much.
 
Lowblowjoebro said:
I did not yet mention the fact that school B has almost double the number of IM matches that school A has - not just give or take a few, like other specialties. If the advice is the same after that piece of information, and if my concerns about student support/advising are completely unwarranted, then I'll leave it at that.
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What's wrong with IM matches?

This whole thread is a perfect example of why pre-meds shouldn't be looking at match lists
 
Lowblowjoebro said:
The main thing I'm getting at is, both match lists look roughly equal except for the fact that school B has a significantly higher number of IM matches and zero prelim surg matches - my question is, does this say anything about advising at the school? I'm imagining a situation where faculty at school A encourages students to apply for prelim surg if they're interested but have lower stats, whereas at school B they say, you can't do surgery just apply to IM. I'm wondering if there's any possible validity to this speculation?
Click to expand...

No, there is not. That information really doesn't do you, an individual applicant, any good, nor does it tell you anything about your future ability to go into surgery from school A vs. school B.
 
Lowblowjoebro said:
Thanks for all of your input! I'm a bit surprised that match list doesn't say much about the school itself, but nevertheless, glad to have an answer.
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Match (and any admissions process actually) is all about the individual. If HMS one year has 40 people who only wanted to do peds, are you gonna think it's worse than NJMS that has many going into surg? Same goes for undergrad record on admissions. Just because so and so school feeds well doesn't necessarily mean it's the better school to be premed at.
 
MeatTornado said:
What's wrong with IM matches?

This whole thread is a perfect example of why pre-meds shouldn't be looking at match lists
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IM isn't gunner enough for OP, that's what's wrong with it. He doesn't wanna risk the chance of being only a general internist, ohh the shame
 
avgn said:
IM isn't gunner enough for OP, that's what's wrong with it. He doesn't wanna risk the chance of being only a general internist, ohh the shame
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Honestly, IMO (and this is likely pretty flawed still), the best way to judge the "strength" of a school when it comes to matches is to see where they match their IM people into across several years. It's the best way to use the worst method of comparing schools.
 
WedgeDawg said:
Honestly, IMO (and this is likely pretty flawed still), the best way to judge the "strength" of a school when it comes to matches is to see where they match their IM people into across several years. It's the best way to use the worst method of comparing schools.
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There might be a correlation between COA and the number of surgery matches. Or maybe not. I'm just speculating lol.
 
Unless you can parse out the "designated" prelims (those where people have already been accepted to advanced programs) from the "undesignated" prelims (often dead end), the number of prelims really doesn't tell you that much. The big programs with lots of patient volume are generally going to need more interns. But with a lot of interns that might mean adequate staffing to allow electives, have call be not so egregious, not be such a disaster when someone drops out of the program. But a place with a lot of dead end prelims might also be a very unhappy place to be after the next match. At any rate I wouldn't put much weight in this.

Also FWIW ortho and other surgical subspecialties match separately so you don't really want to lump them in an analysis of surgery.
 
ITT: if you don't know how prelims work, don't go reading match lists. Even if you do, don't pick a school off of it

/thread

This all reminds me of @Wolf3D 😉
 
You're right. This thread ended long ago when it was stated. I just reiterated

Because a premed with a match list he doesn't know how to read leads to bad bad decisions. Freakonomics is nothing like a match list with regards to medical school (??????) wth kind of analogy is that

Schools are baiting you with the match lists, they are preying on your inexperience and we are telling you **** that, throw that **** away.

As said above, if you're serious about surg then you want research horsepower, so if price and location work out for you then Keck is the clear choice here. You get better weather too, isn't that all the craze these days

And yes since you asked, I disapprove of inquiries that can be easily answered through a quick SDN search. It's not that hard to find out how prelims work or find plentiful discussion of how match lists should be used. But no I'm not discriminating on your post because of this
 
avgn said:
ITT: if you don't know how prelims work, don't go reading match lists. Even if you do, don't pick a school off of it

/thread

This all reminds me of @Wolf3D 😉
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Get a load of this ****er calling me out

OP: prelims generally don't tell you ****. We can, however, assume that USC's high number of prelims means they are matching many people into the competitive residencies that require a prelim year, and many of those gunners are choosing a surgical over an IM year. (e.g., I am doing a medicine prelim before rads next year) This is good news for someone like you also interested in a competitive residency. It is unlikely that many of those prelims from a good school like USC are dead ends. So you should put this out of your mind as I'm sure you already know by now
 
Wolf3D said:
... It is unlikely that many of those prelims from a good school like USC are dead ends...
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I don't know about USC specifically but some of the top academic centers are affiliated with smaller subsidiary hospitals also bearing their name filled with dead end prelims, so you can't really make a blanket statement about "good schools".
 
Law2Doc said:
I don't know about USC specifically but some of the top academic centers are affiliated with smaller subsidiary hospitals also bearing their name filled with dead end prelims, so you can't really make a blanket statement about "good schools".
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I think he was saying that med students graduating from USC are likely not going to dead end prelim years.
 
MeatTornado said:
I think he was saying that med students graduating from USC are likely not going to dead end prelim years.
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This is indeed what I meant. It's not likely that a bunch of USC grads are headed off to dead end prelims, so I can only assume that all those prelims listed on the match list are paired up with categorical gigs that require prelims. Which again for OP's sake is a somewhat positive thing but still useless information because we don't need a match list to know that USC grads match well.
Law2Doc said:
No I think he was saying if it's a good place with lots of prelims it's unlikely a dead end, which though intuitive is actually untrue.
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Not what I meant. I don't know anything about USC's clinical sites to be able to say whether they have some crap community hospital that has "USC prelims" doing their scut. But your point is well taken for premeds reading this to learn more about prelims 😉
 
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