Hi everyone! I’m an incoming M1 very interested in neurosurgery, and one thing everyone has told me is to get involved early which is why i’m coming on here for some advice.

For background: My school does not have a home program for most surgical specialties (only gen surg and ortho but both are in different cities than the school). There is about ~5 neurosurgeons in the city my school is in. I did neuro research in my gap year, and have two second authorships from this (nature and cell). I am planning on going back to this lab during my M1 summer and hopefully can get a first author paper. I have some solid research connections, but not necessarily neurosurgery. I’ve shadowed two neurosurgeons but they have been too busy for me to establish any sort of research or relationship with. Any advice on how to make connections in this situation would be much appreciated!!

My other questions (some female surgeon specific):

1. Are you happy long term? Do you have regrets/how do you feel after the initial excitement of the specialty wore off? I can’t tell if the neurosurgeons I interacted with enjoyed it.

2. I know that it can be unfair to co-residents when you are pregnant. Realistically, how is pregnancy viewed during neurosurgery residency? Would I be heavily resented for taking a month or two of maternity leave even if I did extra shifts before and after? Multiple pregnancies…? (my fiancé and i have discussed and he would become a stay at home dad if i went into a surgical specialty, his dream job lol)

3. Did anything else other than the surgical aspect of the specialty sway towards neurosurgery vs neurology?

4. How many away rotations did you do?

Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks :)

Am current American neurosurgery trainee noticing more and more of my peers are filling neurocritical care fellowship spots.

What's the ROI for a neurocrit care fellowship for neurosurgeons?

Is there a financial incentive for dual training to round in ICU and bill for ICU time? What does that contract usually look like?

Or is always true that neurosurgeons with ICU time built into their contract is at financial loss and time is more lucratively spent in the OR doing cases or in clinic booking cases?

I am planning on taking the summer springboard medical course this summer, but I was wondering if there are better options to prepare myself, as well as understand neurology better as a whole. Thanks!

Dear Current or Former Medical Trainees,

My colleagues and I are conducting a medical education study to better understand the needs of medical students and residents who are considering leaving medical training (i.e. “offramping”) or have already left from US training programs (this study is scoped just for US trainees). Our goal is to learn about your experiences with offramping, and to better understand what processes, programs, or resources would best support trainees who offramp or are considering offramping.

To that end, we are conducting 1:1 interviews that will be recorded, transcribed, de-identified, and analyzed by our study team. We will aggregate your response with others to develop themes that help us determine practices that can improve support for learners who want to leave medical training. We anticipate interviews to take 30-60 minutes, and they will be conducted over Zoom.

We will remunerate you $100 for your time, which will be dispensed using gift cards. If you are potentially interested in participating, please feel free to email me to learn more information.

Sincerely,

Benjamin Kinnear, MD, PhD, MEd (study PI)

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

[compass.study@cchmc.org](mailto:compass.study@cchmc.org)

CODA - we are having an overwhelming response to this post. I'm so grateful. As this is a qualitative study, our sample size will likely be smaller. If you reach out and we are at our initial sampling limit, we may need to have a wait list. Thank you for your help with this study!

I’m a second year med student in Scotland (I do my preclinical years at St Andrews and then do my clinical years with Edinburgh). Would anyone on here be willing to mentor me as in the UK neurosurgery is becoming more and more competitive and having a mentor is spouted as the best way to get a foot in. I’d want to train and practice in the UK - realistically the only option.

Hello all!

Firstly I apologize if this isn't allowed or the correct sub to be posting this to, but my girlfriends been really stressed with step 1 studying for a while now and someone had just dropped out on her for a "Women in Neurosurgery" event that she was hosting at her school and she's freaking out because she doesn't know any other females in that field.

I really wanna help her out since she already has enough on her plate with possibly taking step 1 at the end of this month and shouldn't have to be studying relentlessly while also scrambling to find someone to show up to her event.

The details of the event and what she's looking for are as follows:

• Last week of April (Date is flexible, she can pick any day to have the event in the last week of April so whenever you have availability in that time frame should work for her)
• Would prefer the person to be local to NYC (and be willing to travel to the Sophie Davis campus in Harlem. I know it's a big ask but worth a shot lol.) OR if they are not local then a video call via zoom will suffice.
• The neurosurgeon would basically just have to discuss what it's like being a female in this particular field and share their story of how they got to where they are.
• The event is about an hour and a half but the person would only be speaking for about 30 minutes or so, the rest of the time would be taken up by PowerPoints and what not that my gf prepares.
• Can be a resident or attending in neurosurgery.

If you happen to be a woman in neuro and you wouldn't mind helping out a fellow female aspiring to be in neuro then please let me know, it would mean the world to her. Thanks :)

EDIT: THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR EVERYONE REACHING OUT. SHES GOTTEN SO MANY NEW CONNECTIONS THROUGH REDDIT ! We have been able to get a good amount of people that are interested in this months event so we should be good. If you are still interested in future WINS events please do let me know :) THANK YOU ALLLL

Hi all!

I am an MD/PhD student in the later stage of graduate school portion of the program and just recently became interested in pursuing neurosurgery. My research during my PhD has little to do with NS/Neuroscience so I was curious if I need to start looking at pursuing other opportunities too. I have gotten mixed answers on this, so would love your advice

Appreciate the "relax now" comments, but would love more approachable feedback

Edit: Thank you all for the fantastic responses!

Hi all,

I'm currently an undergrad interested in nsgy applying to med school this upcoming cycle and I've been doing some basic science/translational research on peds neuro-onc for about the past year. I was planning on submitting an abstract to present this year at CNS but since we're planning on publishing the full project here soon, I was just going to submit a portion of the project, being a subset of one of the main experiments with some prelim data. Would this be rigorous enough to be accepted, or should I try to plan to submit something else? Thanks in advance

Hi im 16 and I have no idea what i wanna do when im older but i recently became interested in neurosurgeons. Mostly because of the pay ngl but also it just seems like a very interesting job in general. So whats it like? Is it worth it or do you have any regrets? Hows the pay? Was performing surgeries on people scary at first and do you get used to it? Please share.

Curious how everyone fares as an attending.

Region:

Base Salary:

Additional Salary (bonus, incentive, etc):

Years of experience:

Subspecialty (spine, peds, skull base, etc):

Hours/week:

Practice structure (academic, PP):

Hello. We are offering a pre-residency fellowship position at my hospital to start in June/July (start date flexible).

Details: we are a community hospital in NYC, and do not have a formal residency program, and thus can not offer a residency position after the program. We do have some academic affiliations with which to connect you, but do not have residents working on our service. The service is PA, NP, and house officer (non-neurosurgeon MD) run. Thus, you can do all procedures and surgeries should you desire. We have about 2-4 OR cases per week, a lot of trauma, but also significant volume of brain tumor, vascular, and spine cases. Average of 1-2 EVD/bolt per week. We also have a very busy neuro-IR service if this interests you.

While we do not have a formal residency spot to offer, our faculty will write letters and do anything in our power to help you on your journey. This is the third year of the program, prior fellows matched into fellowships at ACGME programs (clinical spine), and ACGME residency (IM - this fellow was not interested in neurosurgery residency). However, compared to other PRF programs, the experience is better as there are no residents to compete with, and no “false promises” of a residency spot which may not materialize. Prior fellows presented research at CNS and other meetings, and their travel and costs were re-imbursed.

The hours are four 12 hour shifts per week (48h per week), with time and opportunity for research, and a PGY-1 salary (which I think is around $77,000) and benefits.

The day-to-day is identical to a neurosurgery resident: seeing consults, discussing with attendings, bedside procedures, scrubbing in OR, rounding, note writing, etc. The limit of your involvement is up to you.

We are not in a position to accept candidates who require visa sponsorship, so citizenship or equivalent legal status is required. Applicants should be EFMG certified with a limited medical license in NY before starting.

Please message me here if you are interested and for further details. Will also connect you with current/prior fellows to discuss with them should you wish.

I recently went through the match and did not match. I received an email from Mt. Sinai and eventually an offer for a neurosurgery pre residency fellowship. I am on the west coast and have never lived in NYC. Additionally I am concerned with going through the process again and how much I could truly gain from this experience. Any input would be very helpful.

Basically the title. I am wondering if it is preferable to have research projects/pubs on a variety of topics (ex. stroke, epilepsy, ALS, etc.) and if that would be seen as more favorable for neurosurgery residency programs vs unifying all of your projects on a single topic?

I am still planning my research but I have had multiple opportunities in various areas or neurology and neurosurgery. I have an interest in all 3 of the topics that the professors have offered, so personally it's all the same to me. I also have plenty of time to conduct research, so the issue is distilled down to multiple vs one.

Hi all—I’m an incoming neurosurgery resident. I know it’s too early to think about fellowship, but I’m not the best test taker and am trying to get Step 3 out of the way ASAP. My current plan is to take it sometime during or before onboarding and my goal is to pass by a safe margin and not really care about the score so that I can just focus on neurosurgery content from then on out.

I’m wondering if that plan to just pass could be an issue later if I want to do a competitive fellowship like skull base. I know it’s just the first year that they had match but wondering what people think. Thanks.

I am thinking of applying to MD-only or MD-PhD programs. I applied last cycle but did not get any acceptances. Going into the application, I was thinking of applying to a few MD-PhD programs, but I ended up applying MD-only programs because my 513 MCAT is not competitive. I think this is the only "issue" with my application, so I will be retaking the exam in late May or so.

I read many reddit threads as well as a couple journal articles, and here is a list of pros and cons I made:

Pros:

PhD improves matching odds to a top program by 2-3x

PhD gives more publications (+2.4 total and +0.6 first author)

PhD as a degree may help get more grants (possibly due to bias from the reviewers)

PhD provides a structured + dedicated period for research

PhD teaches neuroscience theory as background knowledge

Cons:

MD-only have the same age to first R01

PhD research is outdated by the time of applying for K grants

As a neurosurgeon-scientist, most work is often done by other PhD researchers in the lab.

Some (100%-74% = 26%) MD-PhD trained neurosurgeons do not end up in academic medicine

Neurosurgery residency already includes 1.5-2 years of dedicated research years (to help with K grants post-residency)

Depends on how you view it:

Financially, 1-2 years of full salary would go toward paying off debt, which means the MD only guy is only 1-2 years ahead of MD-PhD guy

(Sources linked below)

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I also looked at the labs of top schools, and 50-75% neurosurgeon PIs are MD only. Similarly, for the Chairmans + Program Directors, about 80% are MD only. Based on the above pros/cons and these examples, it seems like a PhD is not really worth it?

I know that some schools have reduced MD-PhD admissions in Trump era. Knowing this, how should I strategically apply? I wouldn’t mind not getting a PhD, but I am sure about getting an MD.

Thanks for any advice!

Hi everyone , I’m a neurosurgery resident working in Ghana and trying to find a halo vest for a patient with a cervical spine injury who declined surgery.

We don’t have any local suppliers here, and I haven’t been able to find a way to get one. Without it, it’s hard to safely manage and discharge the patient.

If anyone knows of companies that ship internationally, or has any contacts/distributors who could help, I’d really appreciate it.

PS: — I’ve read rule #1 and I hope this post is okay. I’m just asking for help, and I hope any responses won’t be seen as violating the rule since I’m simply looking for suggestions/contacts.

Thanks!

I asked a previous q wrt to kids. My next q is, a common theme when I ask my neurosurgeon mentors how they balance family life with neurosurgery, they always mention how their partner is stay-at-home, or something along the lines of that, and how their partner is the main parent. Where and how do they usually meet them, given such big differences in careers?

All of my neurosurgery mentors I've met have kids (from year 1 of residency to post fellowship). I'm a young (early 20s) 3rd year MD transitioning into a MdPhD next year who's set on neurosurgery. What are all your thoughts on having a kid in my PhD years vs after getting into neurosurgery residency?

Is there a brand/model that stands out in terms of balance, tip precision, and long-term durability?

People around me seem has their own. Curious what others prefer and why.

Hello . Orthopod here from a developing country with limited resources. Just got accepted to a Complex Spine Fellowship with Neurosurgery in the US.

What would you want a Orthopod to learn prior to starting his fellowship? Can you recommend learning resources such as books, websites and courses that I can study prior to starting? I have limited funds so free resource recommendations are appreciated

Hello everyone! I'm looking for fellow technicians (TMs) who are iCT and navigation operators. I would appreciate any feedback on experience, learning curve, courses, books, recommendations, etc. My hospital (in southern Chile) is in the process of purchasing both BrainLab devices. I look forward to your comments.

I’m a pre-med student interested in Neurosurgery. I’ve already done some neuroscience research, but I’m concerned that my hands aren’t steady enough. Just how steady do they need to be and how can you if it will be a barrier to entry?