Neurosurgery

Offered to and highly encouraged for any senior medical student interested in pursuing neurosurgical residency training to become a neurosurgeon, the Yale Neurosurgery Subinternship provides an invaluable experience in understanding the great privilege and demands of being a neurosurgeon. Please note the Yale Subinternship is required for all Yale School of Medicine students planning to enter the match for neurosurgery and is strongly recommended prior to outside subinternship experiences.

The Yale Subinternship allows senior medical students the opportunity to vastly extend their breadth of knowledge of neurological diseases and how they are managed both surgically and non-surgically. Moreover, it provides non-Yale medical students firsthand insight into what makes our Department and Residency Program so exceptional. Simply put, our residents receive comprehensive training in a supportive and stimulating environment, which allows them to graduate as competent and capable neurosurgeons.

Sub-interns spend a total of 4 weeks on service and become immersed in our day-to-day service, functioning essentially as a supervised intern, working closely with our cohesive group of mid–level providers, residents and attendings in the inpatient, outpatient and operating room settings. Sub-interns are expected to participate in the evaluation and management of assigned patients, pre-round with writing of ICU notes, make rounds with our teams, attend clinics, assist in ICU procedures and surgeries, as well as attend academic conferences. Sub-interns are expected to present their scholarly work at one of our academic conferences. Sub-internship hours never exceed 80 hours/week with a maximum of 16 hour-shifts, as required by the Yale School of Medicine.

Our service is a busy one and sub-interns will have a wide range of surgical and clinical experiences upon their completion. Examples of surgeries frequently encountered on our service include, but not limited to: aneurysm surgery with craniotomy or endovascular coiling or stenting, carotid endarterectomy, pediatric skull and spine reconstruction and repairs, brain tumor surgery, including awake craniotomy, epilepsy surgery, transnasal surgery, deep brain stimulation and spine surgery, including minimally invasive and deformity correction surgery. We strongly encourage students to take on as much involvement with our patients as both feel comfortable with and our faculty and staff welcome questions and are dedicated to teaching.

The Elective Coordinator and Neurosurgery Coordinators (neurosurgeryresidency@yale.edu) interface with students and YSM to facilitate applications and schedules. Further information, including a link to the VSAS application for external students, is available at https://medicine.yale.edu/neurosurgery/education/subinternship/. Our coordinators attempt to schedule students such that there is minimal student overlap in an effort to optimize each student’s experience.

Length of Rotation: 4 weeks (maximum-4 students)

Scheduling Restriction: None, though attempts are made to minimize student overlap when possible

Student's Class Level: 3rd, 4th, 5th year

Prerequisite: N/A, though prior rotation on a Neurosurgery Clerkship is highly encouraged

Accept Visiting Students: Yes. Visiting students should bring with them a copy of their home school's evaluation form for completion by the Program Director. Please do not send this with your application.

Correspondence:All correspondence with Yale regarding the status of your elective request will be via e-mail. This might require you to take off filters, or add the above e-mail address to a list of accepted senders.

Learning Objectives