Have you ever been confused when people talk about certain medical specialties being competitive?
Me too.
In this video, we’ll go over the official statistics and explore which are the most
competitive and desired specialties.
What’s going on guys, Dr. Jubbal, MedSchoolInsiders.com.
For those of you who don’t know, I graduated medical school in 2017 and matched into plastic
surgery.
To learn more about my story, visit my vlog channel - link in the description below.
There’s a tremendous amount of misinformation regarding which medical specialties are competitive.
Everyone wants to say their specialty is competitive - and they’re not wrong.
Getting into any residency is a challenging ordeal.
That being said, some specialties are more competitive and harder to get into than others.
I understand the pride involved, but whether or not your specialty is considered competitive
does not make you a good or bad doctor.
It simply says which specialties
are hardest to get into.
And knowing which specialties are hardest to get into can be very useful information
for pre-meds and medical students.
Again, all specialties are competitive, and if your specialty is ranked lower than you would
like, that’s not a judgement or an attack on you in any way.
This is simply the data.
Period.
You can find links to the data in the description.
First, let’s cover the methodologies that I used.
I gathered all data from the official source - the NRMP, or the National Resident Matching
Program, over the last few years.
I manually inputted all data into a spreadsheet that I’ve linked to in the description for
you to view.
There’s always someone complaining about imperfect methodologies – look, every analysis
has its limitations.
I urge you to view the spreadsheet and play with the data to see for yourself.
Before we dive in, it’s important to note that ophthalmology and urology are not included
in the regular match, and therefore their data was not included in this analysis.
That being said, if you look up their average Step scores and match rates, it’s clear
neither would have been in the top 5 anyway.
I used data for U.S. applicants only, as incorporating international medical graduates, or IMGs,
would muddy the analysis.
I looked beyond just the match rate, as that would be a terribly inaccurate marker of competitiveness.
And now you’re probably confused.
If it has a low match rate, then it must be more competitive, right?
Well, not exactly.
Specialties are self-selecting to a certain degree.
I recently saw a video by someone who went only off of match rates, and in doing so,
they suggested that general surgery and psychiatry were the third most competitive specialties.
Anyone who is in medical school or residency will tell you that’s certainly not the case.
For example, in plastic surgery, applicants use general surgery as their backup in case
they don’t get into plastics.
Look at it this way - if you’re not a competitive applicant, you’re not going to apply to
something like plastic surgery or neurosurgery or dermatology.
But lots of people want to do surgery, since surgery is freakin awesome, and general surgery is
the most commonly applied to.
General surgery is an excellent field, it's tremendously broad, extremely diverse, leaves options open to subspecialize
after, and it's also the least competitive of the surgical specialties.
Therefore it has a very high number of applicants and a low match rate.
This is not a judgement against general surgery in any way.
This is just an explanation for the low match rate in general surgery.
In order to overcome the shortcomings of looking at match rate alone, I examined six categories
of data: average match rate, Step 1 score, Step 2CK score, number of publications, percentage
of matriculants that were AOA, and percentage of applicants from a top 40 NIH funded medical
school.
AOA, or the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, is an honor society in medicine – what
you need to know for the purposes of this analysis is that being AOA is a good indicator
of being a high performing student.
Obviously it’s not perfect, as some schools don’t have it.
For example, mine didn’t, and therefore I wasn’t AOA, despite being at the top of
my class.
Top 40 NIH funded medical schools are usually more competitive, meaning students that got
into these schools were, on average, stronger students.
Emphasis on average.
After compiling the data, I ranked each specialty in each of the six categories.
This was a point-based ranking system.
Each category was weighed equally and points were awarded directly in relation to the ranking.
Meaning, there are 22 specialties, and the lowest ranking in that category would receive
1 point and the top ranking in that category would receive 22 points.
I summed up the points across each category and looked at the total points to determine
which specialties were most competitive.
Now’s your chanc e to hedge your bets.
Dermatology came in first, trailed closely by plastic surgery in second.
Neurosurgery was third, followed by orthopedic surgery fourth and then ENT in fifth.
And honestly, I’m not surprised by these results - and
that’s a good sign.
If you’re a medical student or a resident, you probably aren’t surprised either.
But many people have heard of this ROAD to success – ROAD stands for Radiology, Ophthalmology,
Anesthesiology, and Dermatology.
If you’re surprised that the other three ROAD specialties aren’t included in the
top 5, don’t be.
Radiology, Ophtho, and Anesthesia are not nearly as competitive as the top 5.
ROAD specialties indicate those that have a great lifestyle - NOT necessarily those which
are the most competitive.
An interesting pattern I noticed was that the top 5 were all very well paying specialties.
Neurosurgery and orthopedic surgery are almost always the top 2 best paid specialties, regardless
of the survey.
Plastic surgery is also up there, but it’s important to note that cosmetic practices
make much more than reconstructive practices.
Dermatologists don’t make as much as the other top 4 specialties, all of which are
surgical, and that makes sense - surgeons put in more work and do more challenging procedures,
but dermatologists have an excellent lifestyle that’s hard to beat.
So the conclusion of all this?
It’s quite clear that the most competitive specialties are highly correlated with either
excellent pay or excellent lifestyle.
Correlation is not causation, but I think it’s safe to say that there’s more than
simple correlation going on here.
Exploring this finding further is a topic for another video.
Was this analysis perfect?
Absolutely not – but then again, every analysis has limitations.
That being said, this is the most comprehensive one I’ve seen.
So what do you think of the results?
Are you surprised, or is this what you were expecting?
Leave a comment down below – I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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And I’ll see you in that next one.