what does it mean to match to one of the "pre-lim" specialties

[drcarter77]

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I've been looking through the match lists for various schools and have seen the "pre-lim" med and surgery for a bunch of places. what does that mean exactly and should I view that as a negative if a school has a whole bunch of them. Ie. i want to go into gen surgery, so would it be a bad sign to see a school matching more people pre-lim surgery than just a regular gen surgery residency?

 

[FlowLimited]

No, this is not necessarily a bad thing. There are a number of specialties that require a preliminary year in general medicine or surgery before progressing to the particular residency program.

 

[Ashers]

1st: it's prelim, no dash; it's short for preliminary year. They're typically in medicine or surgery, but they can also be in peds, and I've heard OB/gyn.

2nd: This was discussed in the match list thread. Brief overview.

If it's just a prelim without a corresponding residency, that may mean the person didn't match into their advanced position and they only matched into their prelim, and we unable to scramble into another advanced so they may just reapply in the upcoming cycle.

OR They did not match into their categorical and scrambled into a prelim for something to do in the next year while they reapply and build their application.

A prelim (or transitional year) by itself is typically no one's choice.

 

[slowbutsteady]

so it's a bad thing, right?

 

[FlowLimited]

so it's a bad thing, right?

No, not necessarily. It may be, or it may not be.

 

[Crickter]

Some of the sub- specialties like Ophthalmology, Urology, Neurosuregry want you to do one year of Gen surgery ( like urology & Neuro) ophthalmology wants you to do one year of medicine and those who are not sure what specialty they want to go in they just do one year of preliminary
medicine or surgery.

 

[SouthernSurgeon]

No, not necessarily. It may be, or it may not be.

As outlined above: people get prelim years in one of a few ways
1) match to a specialty (like derm) that requires a separate intern year (their match will then be to a prelim + advanced categorical)
2) attempt to match to a specialty (like derm) that requires a separate intern year; fail to secure an advanced categorical position and end up with a prelim only match
3) don't match at all; secure a prelim spot through the scramble

In general, if a match list lists only a prelim spot then it is a bad thing. Usually if someone matched to a prelim + an advanced categorical position, the list will go ahead and show both of those