Surgical sub-specialties are some of the toughest fields of medicine, and students often ponder on how to make their surgical residency application stand out. Surgery Interest Group (SIG), once again, answered this question at the latest Surgery Saturday on the 18th of July. With a multinational panel yet again, SIG brought a game-changer to the table: Research- A Bridge To Residency! Participants all across Pakistan and beyond attended this talk as panelists at different stages of their journeys talked about how research work can pave the way to a surgical residency.
Starting with their greatly varied interests and experiences, from global surgery to clinical work, they talked about their paths, their preferred sub-specialty, and their aim for the future. They then went on to inform students of the pros of research work experience. This not only included the advantage it had on residency applications, but it also included a discussion about the skills they acquired, and how that helped them, or will help them in the future. ‘There are only pros’, they agreed unanimously.
Indeed, their career choices greatly affected the type of research work they had done, with national projects in Pakistan for those interested in global surgery, and clinical work for those keen on pursuing residencies abroad and using that time for giving exams. They talked about their varied duties, from field data collection to statistical analysis, and from graphic designing to interacting with the government, as they made leaps in their careers with their work.
Furthermore, our panelists strongly emphasized that having an extreme passion is of utmost importance before embarking on a lifelong journey of research positions, course talks and surgical sub-specialties. If not, they’ll frankly find it immensely grinding. Also, they made a point of learning how to draft professional emails for the faculty, something medical students increasingly tend to overlook.
Almost halfway through, we were joined by Dr Ammar Asrar Javed, [MBBS, ’13], currently serving in Johns Hopkins Hosptial as the Lead Postdoctoral Research Fellow & Senior Program Coordinator (Pancreatic Surgery). Known as one of AKU’s most friendly alumnus and an incredible mentor, he built upon the need to be passionate about surgery before doing course talks or applying for research positions. Moreover, he commended the Surgery Interest Group on holding this talk and encouraged participation in future talks especially from students outside of AKU. In addition, he prompted the participants to reach out to the Alumni for any queries they would wish to discuss with them.
The participants sent over their questions to our moderators on the meeting chat. The panelists addressed these questions separately at the end during the Question-Answer session. The meeting was attended by surgery enthusiasts from years 1 through 5 thus exuding remarkable diversity to the queries discussed. Cross questions and discussion between our panelists made the session all the more interactive and lively. Questions related to Research work and its impact on matching into surgery residencies abroad as well as in Pakistan were asked the most frequently.
Extremely humbled and overjoyed by the enthusiastic response from participants and Alumni alike, the Surgery Interest Group looks forward to holding more talks in the near future.
The recording of the talk is available here.