ATul Jain, MD
Contributing Editor
Unfortunately, as with everything, medicine continues to become more competitive, and retina (at least surgical) fellowships are no different. Presented here are some basic stats for what it is like to acquire one of the top 10 retina fellowships in the country. As to what exactly are the top 10 fellowships, that’s certainly open for debate, but for the purposes of this discussion let’s assume the following: Beaumont (2), Columbia (1), Duke (2), Emory (2), Harvard (3), Oregon (2), UCLA (2), USC (2), Washington University (2), and Johns Hopkins (3); the number in parenthesis is the annual number of fellows, doing the math quickly reveals that there are about 21 “top 10” fellowship seats across the country.
What does it take to snag one of these coveted positions? Well, first off, one generally needs to have completed an accredited ophthalmology residency in the US. But it is not so straightforward, as simply completing a residency is not good enough; the strength of the residency is of critical importance as well as the applicant’s performance during residency. Thus, it’s not shocking to realize that in order to obtain a top fellowship seat, it’s expected that an applicant complete a top residency. And what did it take to get a top ophthalmology residency seat? Well, it usually involves doing well at a top 50 US medical school, which generally entailed doing well in undergraduate studies and the requisite standardized testing.
SO, when all is said and done, most top retina fellowships receive about 80 – 110 completed applications from US ophthalmology resident applicants, they generally select about 10 applicants to interview per seat, thus, most programs interview about 20 applicants (the majority of which went to top notch undergraduate institutions, medical schools, and residencies, of which about 25% have an additional advanced degree in addition to their MD, i.e.—master’s or PhD).
The hard numbers: about 39,000 applicants apply for the 17,000 US medical school seats, of those, approximately 600 - 700 apply for the 420 US ophthalmology residency seats, and of those, about 90 apply for the top 21 retina fellowship seats. The competition just keeps getting stiffer as one advances—it seems as though getting into medical school was the easy part!
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