Hey everyone,
When I was on the interview trail it seemed like every program had a really impressive match list for fellowship and most people get what they want. This brings me to four questions:
1. How competitive are Neurology fellowships exactly? Is there a general ranking order of most competitive to least?
2. Is it super rare to obtain a Pain Medicine fellowship as a Neurologist?
3. What are some "procedural" sub specialties in Neurology?
4. For some reason I think I'd want to practice general neurology. I like the variety of it and think I'd get bored doing the same thing everyday. Do people even do that anymore and get jobs?
Thanks!
1. In general, just like neuro residencies, fellowships are not usually super-competitive except at big-name places. In fact, sometimes the big-name places can actually be paradoxically easier to get into because 1) there is a tendency for places to feed their own residents into their own fellowship programs, and 2) big programs may have more fellowship slots open than they have their own residents interested in taking them, so they may have spare open slots. A small program with, say, 1 EMG fellow a year may be taken up by an internal resident but a big program with 4 slots may only have 2 or 3 "home grown" neuro residents who want it.
This was actually my own anecdotal experience when I was applying for fellowships: I was getting shut out of places I thought I'd have no problem getting in to, but getting called for interviews by places I didn't expect would even look at my application.
Also, some fellowships (sleep, pain and interventional) can be quite competitive due to high demand and relatively low number of programs. Other stuff like neurophys, epilepsy, headache, MS, are not too tough.
2. Don't know. Probably not "super rare" but also probably not super easy. Would probably go ask this over in the Pain forum for a better answer.
3. EMG, EEG, sleep, interventional
4. I'd hire you in a minute to do general neuro. You could see all the general neuro stuff and I can to my subspecialty work. Wait . . . that's the problem . . . everybody wants to do subspecialty work . . .
So, yes, you could find a job pretty easily, especially in "community" as opposed to "academic" practices.
Many people do EMG/EEG because it gives you a billable procedure. Others do other subspec fellowships out of interest and would just prefer to focus on their own area rather than "general neuro" (defined as: "everything that's not my subspecialty"
😉) Seeing chronic headache and TIA patients for 15 minute followups all day gets a bit tedious after a while unless you have some particular interest in those areas. Also, those office visits don't pay as much as doing EMGs or angiograms, so that's another issue.
