Session 56 Neurosurgery follows the rules of economics. There are very few spots, so it is really competitive to get into. We covered the NRMP Match data for Neurosurgery. Neurosurgery is one of those residencies that are super hard to get into. Ryan has had an academic neurosurgeon previously on Episode 20 of this podcast. Please subscribe to this podcast. We're on Spotify now! Check us out there as well as on any Android phone, or on Stitcher and Google. Nevertheless, the podcast app on the iOS is the best way to subscribe on an iPhone or iPad. You will also find all our episodes on the MedEd Media Network. Let's dive into today's data... All information here are based on the NRMP Main Residency Match 2017, Charting the Outcomes 2016, Medscape Lifestyle Report 2017, and Medscape Compensation Report 2017. Ryan walks you through the data along with some commentaries. So you will know what it means and what it looks like and what you should be thinking about if you're interested in Neurosurgery. [02:30] Match Summary for 2017 Looking at Table 1 of NRMP Main Residency Match 2017 Summary, Neurological Surgery is how they list it. For this field, they have 0 unfilled programs. This means lots of people are applying for neurosurgery and they're getting filled. There are 107 programs. Comparing this to other fields, Emergency Medicine has 191 programs and Anesthesiology with 124 programs. So for neurosurgery there are 107 programs and 218 positions. It's just over two spots per program. Comparing this to Anesthesiology, it has 124 programs and 1202 positions. This is almost 10 spots per program. This said, there are not a ton of spots and programs for neurosurgery, but every program is super small on average. As you think about your journey, and you're dead set on being a neurosurgeon, all this data shows that you need to well. "If you're dead set on being a neurosurgeon, you better buckle down for medical school...to make sure you have great board scores, great grades." So for U.S. Seniors there are 212. Again, U.S. Seniors here means that it's somebody who's an allopathic/MD still a senior in school. So this doesn't include U.S. Grads who are now taking a gap year, doing research, or doing something else who have graduated. There are 311 total applicants for those 218 spots. Through this episode, Ryan will discuss where these other 99 students are coming from. And out of those U.S. Seniors, 183 matched. So it's 83.9% U.S. Seniors matching in an allopathic medical school. This tells you that they're favoring students at allopathic medical schools. [06:45] Summary of Students: U.S. Seniors, U.S. Grads, IMGs, Osteopaths Table 2 shows where these students are coming from. Again, 83.9% of those that matched are U.S. Seniors. And 15% of those students are U.S. Grads. This means they probably took a year off or they didn't match their first time around so they did research or whatever. There are 2 osteopathic students and 4 U.S. citizen international medical graduates matched into neurosurgery. Looking at this data, is going to a Caribbean school better than going to an osteopathic school? Thinking this alone is wrong. You can't draw these conclusions as to why the numbers say so. If all four of those students when to a DO school, they might have still matched because of who they are, not the letters after their name. "You can't draw conclusions that says going to Caribbean school, Australia, or Ireland better than going to a DO school if you want to match into neurosurgery." Non-U.S. citizens international medical graduates are 14 of those that matched. They are obviously strong students who crushed their boards that they were able to match almost as many students as U.S. graduates. [09:22] Yearly Trends Table 3 shows the yearly trend showing a slow, steady incline every year for the number of positions from 204 to 218 over the last five years. It's a 0.8% increase every year from 2013 to 2017. Looking at Table 8 shows the number o