When I grow up…. Surgery

Though many of you may be currently tackling the medical admissions process, it is never too early to start casting an eye towards your future speciality choice. This is not only important to bring some light to the end of an awfully long tunnel, but also for pragmatic considerations as for a vast majority of specialities you need to plan early. Long gone are the days where a recently post-graduate, junior doctor could stick their hand up and enter a surgical training program – in the current environment, there are hundreds of hopefuls every year vying for the 1-10 training spots nation-wide in each speciality.

The purpose of this article is to give you a brief background of the surgical profession, as well as the requirements to enter into the profession. This blog is simply too short to complete a full and comprehensive review, but I will direct you to some very informative sources of information! Again, it’s not worth you wasting days of your life now to memorise the complete training pathway and its requirements, but it is worth at the very least considering where you want your career to go.

Surgery (and to be as simple as possible, ‘surgery’ here will refer to general surgery… though many of the comments are true for all the sub-specialities) is one of the most competitive specialities to get into, and one of the hardest to stay in. Surgeons work incredibly long hours, with seemingly little reward in the majority of their early career, and tend to the surgical management of patients. In medical school, you will typically not have a lot (or no) surgery-specific education or training, though it is highly important that all medical students do. As a result, many student-run organisations called ‘surgical societies’ have begun to run events and activities to deliver these educational needs to students outside of a packed curriculum. Indeed, I was partly responsible in creating the ‘Surgical Interest Association’, which runs primarily out of Griffith University.

It is important to start thinking about this career early on – even in your first year you can undertake activities that will put you in a better place to enter the surgical training program. Junior doctors are selected into this program, typically 2-4 years after graduation, following assessment from the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) of their curriculum vitae, referees, and on interview. The referees here are professional ones you’ll pick up post-med school (can be doctors, nurses, admin staff), and the interview is obviously completed at the time of assessment. This means that the CV is the one thing you can look to enhance in medical school, and you should start to look at this early on – again, a lot of this advice is similar to every speciality, it is very competitive to get into a training program…. You thought getting into medical school was hard enough! 

The CV is marked through various measures, such as research performance, leadership experience, sporting activities, academic achievement etc. You can actually go to each College’s individual internet page and find the specific information for what speciality looks for (such as the Neurosurgical Society of Australasia), which can vary. Regardless, getting involved in semi-relevant (at least) research in your area of interest is very important early on, as publications by the time you finish medical school are big ticks! Getting involved in leadership positions in your surgical society is also important, not just for the CV, but also for the ability to network with a whole range of surgeons. Finally, doing well in your studies and picking up any individual awards or recognition is also worthwhile!

Again, this article is not supposed to be a comprehensive analysis of how to get into surgical training, but really just to open your eyes to the fact you’ll have to look at this fairly closely when you start studying medicine. It is never becoming too early to start enhancing yourself for your future career!

Check out our GAMSAT To Med School Podcast for more interesting news, tips & tricks about the GAMSAT, applying to medical school, and life at med school.