First of all, deciding what fellowship to do before you have even done a residency is a little premature. That being said, it depends on what type of career you want afterwords. If you want a academic career you should probably go to somewhere that can plug you into that circle of people. If you wanna go into provate practice it does not matter so much. Many people around here think that if you go to a community program you cant match into the "big name" fellowships. I dont believe that to be true. My program is a community program and we have had people get great fellowships like shoulder at Columbia, shoulder at Penn, trauma at carolinas, joints at harvard, hand at mayo, spine at case western, etc.
Almost everywhere I interviewed at as a MS4 told me the same things:
"ohh yeah, all our guys get good fellowships" and apparently the intraining exam is scored in a strange way (sarcasm) because everybody says "we score in the 90th percentile on the test" That probably means that they at least have SOMEONE scorethat high, but not the whole program. I literally was told that at EVERY place I went.
Personally, I think what you should pay attention to is how you "mesh" with the people at a program, b/c you are gonna be there for 5 years. All our guys get along great, and I would not wanna be somewhere that there is a lot of big egos clashing. Just my 2 cents/opinion
