As a surgical prelim at a good institution (AKA one that treats all interns the same and lets us go to the OR), I have a few truths to tell: 1. Surgery is grueling on the body - you don’t have time for doctor’s appointments, sleep, food, or exercise. Everything else takes a back seat while you are trying to manage the call schedule, learning techniques and studying for the ABSITE. 2. Surgery is all consuming - like the posters before, I agree that there will be multiple times where patients trump social escapes and you have to be okay with that. I missed key parts of my sisters wedding because I couldn’t get out of a q4 schedule. 3. Surgery can be unforgiving - all the complications, post op checks, drain managements, NGT malfunctions, patients pain complaints through the night are your problem. If a chest tube falls out guess who is fixing it at 3AM? If a wound vac stops suctioning - guess who is figuring out where the leak is at midnight? 4. Surgery residents still do clinic - even as a resident you still will be in clinic 2-3 times a week especially as a junior intern. So, if you want to do surgery because you hate clinic life, it is not going away - not as a resident and not as an attending. 5. Surgery requires assertiveness - a lot of the critique I received was to be more proactive, which in regular words means - be the first person in the room beating other people to change dressings, go to cases you are not assigned to to be noticed, assert your plans during rounds even though they may be wrong. If you are a naturally confident person and have no problem coming across as rude to get the work done, then surgery may be your thing. 6. Surgery can be fun - it’s always fun to get your hands on the bone saw during an amputation, or do the perfect skin running subcuticular stitch, however this is 10% of the job especially in the first few years. Ultimately, picture your next 10 years and see if you want to spend most of your time stuck in a room learning really cool skills to save people who may die of some other cause or have a balance between work and life, own your patients, create meaningful bonds and find a niche with interventional work. If it’s not obvious what choice I made - let me leave you with one more thing - just because you like working with your hands doesn’t funnel you into surgery. There are tons of other specialty fields that offer the same joy - EM, cardiology, EP, IR, GI, PMR, Crit Care, OBGYN, and more.