Are there any pediatric surgeons here ???

Question

I already know what a pediatric surgeon is; it is someone who performs surgery on kids, infants and toddlers.

What I really want to know are things like how hard is it to get accepted into schools to becoming a pediatric surgeon, medical school. Which schools are good for medicine majors?

How is a regular day on the job as a pediatric surgeon? Do you recommend this job? If yes, how come…

What is the easiest type of surgeon to be?

Answer 1

It not easy to get into medical schools in the US, as there are many limitations such as state residency that limit the # of state medical schools available to you. Private medical schools are more costly. In addition, they look at where you have gone to school, your GPA, your performance on the entrance exam, as well as extra curricular activities. You can be any major you want in college, but you must take all the pre-med requirements. You can get more information from the American Association of Medical Colleges. If you do not want to go to an American medical school, there are other medical schools (eg, Carribean, Europe, Mexico).

Answer 2

Medical school is not where you learn to become a pediatric surgeon; you do that in residency (your post-graduate training).  The most you would do in medical school is to take a senior elective in your fourth year in pediatric surgery; you are not expected to be actually learning to perform surgery at that point but just to be learning what it is that a pediatric surgeon does.

Similarly, medicine is not a "major"--you pick a major in college, and you have to go to college first, before you apply to medical school.  You can major in anything you want in college as long as you cover the pre-requisites for medical school, which are actually not that extensive (one year each of English, chemistry, organic chemistry, biology and physics and usually a year of math).  Med school is pretty much the same for everyone except for those senior electives, and you don't have to know what kind of doctor you want to be until you're ready to apply for residency.

It's competitive to get into medical school, and it is also competitive to get a surgical residency.  You need to do well in college to get into med school, and you need to do well in med school to match into surgery.  Surgical residency is five years and you then would do a two year fellowship in pediatric surgery to follow that.  You could also do more years in fellowship if you wanted to subspecialize even further.

Pediatric surgery is a stressful field--surgery is always an emotional thing for people to go through, and all the more so when children are involved.  Surgeons generally work very long hours and work very hard while they are in the hospital; days when they are not doing surgery they will be evaluating patients and following up on patients who have already undergone their procedures.

It's a very important job, and I have a huge amount of admiration for those who can do it.  But no question, it's a difficult profession.  I would hesitate to pin an "easy" label on any kind of surgery.  They're all tough in training; once you're fully trained and out of residency, I guess you can try and work fewer hours if you want.  But if that's what you want, you probably don't want to be a surgeon.  They mostly do it because they love to do it--it's not because it's an easy job.