By Dean W. Smith, MD

No, I wouldn’t change a thing.  Was it difficult? Absolutely, but shouldn’t it be? Even though today 75% of what I do as a hand surgeon I didn’t do as a resident, residency taught me the necessities of classical orthopaedics, patient care, and instilled a solid core of surgical principles that established a foundation of knowledge and experience to build from. Residency teaches us how to be a doctor, how to be life-long students, how to review the literature, investigate new technologies, and how to incorporate these into a surgical practice.

While all of us will have different experiences during our training and what is the current clinical environment of training today is clearly different than my experience, we owe it to our future surgeons in training to pass on these core principles as an orthopaedic and hand surgeon. Mentoring and one-on-one training remain foundational values in developing our future hand surgeons. My advice to medical students seeking out a surgical specialty: take advantage of your residency as there will be no other time in your career that will allow for intensified learning over a 5-year period. Therefore, I wouldn’t change a thing.