Correlation between Musical, Artistic, and Athletic Experience and Surgical Interests among Medical Students

Document Type

Abstract

Publication Date

2-2021

Academic Year

2020-2021

Abstract

The role of extracurricular activities both before and during medical school has been studied, however there have been no studies regarding the link between types of extracurriculars and residency applications. This paper strives to explore the relationship between musical, artistic, and athletic extracurricular experiences with the decision to apply to surgical versus non-surgical residency programs. A categorical survey was completed by current fourth year medical students (n= 45) via Google Forms. The survey consisted of questions to gauge prior musical, artistic, and athletic experience and determine if the applicants applied to a surgical or non-surgical residency program. After collecting the data, the data was analyzed by T-tests to determine the statistical significance. Preliminary data analysis shows no statistical significance between the surgical and non-surgical groups any extracurricular experiences; analysis is ongoing. Potential reasons that lead to data that is not statistically significant include selection bias and small sample size. Selection bias could be that people who are in medical school are more likely to be involved in extracurriculars as compared to people who are not in medical school. Additionally, perhaps there was self-selection bias; people who had an interest in taking the survey had this interest due to their personal involvement. A total of 45 students responded to the survey, and considering the total population of about 270 students this sample is a sufficient representation of the population, but perhaps a larger sample size would have yielded different results. Future papers could control for these factors, and could have the potential to provide not only relevant residency matching information to medical students, but also information about potential candidates to residency programs.

Language

English

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