Input very much appreciated

Best advice i can think of is go to your schools residency lists for past years and see where previous grads have gone for ortho. If your school doesn't have any ortho matches then check out the websites of other schools who have successfully matched students into ortho: St. George's and Ross.

Good luck.

Dave

I think you need to take a serious look at your application and plan accordingly. By your own admission your 1) scores are not impressive 2) coming from a foreign school 3) have no research. Looking at the 2005 match report, something like 93% of US applicants have some sort of research, 60 something percent were AOA, and the average board score is around a 230....and those are just the numbers for US grads. You've got some serious strikes against your application.

Based on your post, it seems as if you're already planning for the 2009 match. I'm not sure that one year of anything is going to raise your application enough to get you a spot. I'm not trying to be cruel, just realistic. There are often spots that get posted on this forum for year-long ortho research positions that may open an intern spot for the following year, but without any promises. If I were you and I wanted it bad enough, I'd give myself one year to try to do something research related and plan for another specialty in the 2009 match if you fail to match ortho. There's nothing sadder than a passionate graduate who sits for multiple years doing research with false hopes of securing an ortho residency.