<p>im currently looking into surgery as a profession, and i was wondering what kind of residency life an aspiring surgeon would lead? how brutal is the schedule and how many years of it is required/recommended?</p>
<p>A general surgery residency is 5 years. Call schedules are among the most brutal of all residencies, some times a 24 hour shift every two days (though this is less common than it used to be before the 80 hour a week cap). That 80 hour a week limit is an average over the month, and so if you do have to undertake q2 call shifts, then you'd likely get some sort of week off or alternating call weeks or something.</p>
<p>I'm at my parent's house right now, so I don't have access to my full resources, but I'll post more info tommorow.</p>
<p>so thats like 13yrs of study, whats the base pay for general surgeons, or do they specialise after that/</p>
<p>I'm pretty sure you can be just a regular General Surgeon of go into one of the MANY surgical specialties by going into a fellowship... correct me if i'm wrong</p>
<p>Here's a neat website I found. Med students can use it to find residency positions at certain hospitals, but I've found it useful for my purposes just to see what specialties and specialties there are.</p>
<p>For example, if you select the "Neurological Surgery" box and look at the various programs that it shows you--and then if you click on one of the programs that it lists, such as "Brown University Program" you can learn about the call schedule for residents at that particular hospital.</p>
<p>In Brown's Neurosurgery Program, for example, it says residents work an avg of 70 hrs/week for 6 years (after one year of a general surgery residency) for a salary that starts at $45,000 and increases by about $3000/year for the rest of residency. </p>
<p>Anyway, hope that helped.</p>