I have absolutely no affiliation or feelings about Penn. I also never post on the boards, but feel the need to put my two cents in since the majority of these posts seem to be heavily emotionally charged.
I think your eventual ability as an orthopaedic surgeon depends very little on your residency program and much more on your personal attributes. At my program there are attendings and fellows from all different types of programs. Some are from Harvard type places, some are from schools with a lesser name. Some of these people are amazing surgeons, some are not as impressive, having little correlation with where you trained.
From talking to all of these attendings and fellows, spending time in the OR with them, it does seem that programs with bigger names and therefore fellows will not give you as good of an operative experience. Some of these attendings will flat out admit that they never got to operate as a resident. Yet despite having little operative experience in residency, some of them are great surgeons now, at the top of their fields.
So what I conclude from this is that big name places probably give you less of an operative experience, but this will likely only affect you in your first year or so of practice. If you have good hand-eye coordination, 3d skills, a knowledge base and confidence, you will probably be fine no matter where you go. Big name places do make it quite a bit easier to do research and get fellowships however.
So keep this is mind. I'm sure there are many Penn grads who are great surgeons, there are probably some who aren't, but that's true of every program. So you should pick your program based on how it fits what you want. If you really want to be a chairman someday, go to Harvard, if you don't go somewhere else you like. You will probably end up the same surgeon one day anyway.
