I would agree with your choice of well respected academic fellowships. I don't agree with some of your comments about particular fellowships, however.
"Jefferson: very trauma heavy, minimally invasive experience limited, deformity experience not as good as other places. Fellows do not round - just OR, clinic, and research. Great faculty, good neurosurgery experience."
Jefferson, has one of the most famous minimally invasive surgeons in spine surgery. He actually wrote the instructional course lecture on image guidance in spinal surgery. They have a very well rounded experience that is light on deformity.
"Wash U: very deformity heavy. Fellows do big cases with great faculty. Fellows work harder here than at any other program, doing tons of scut (like writing for TPN) and also take general trauma call. No real minimally invasive experience."
Wash U has a great deformity, C spine, and (now) trauma experience. They also have a new faculty who does a fair bit of degenerative. Sounds like their fellows work pretty hard at scut, however. It's also up to you to get your research done -- very little help and you are busy doing floor scutwork. Also, noone ever mentioned to me about the Wash U fellows covering general trauma.
"Rush U: very little hot trauma, but moderate cold trauma. Very degenerative and deformity heavy. Great faculty and great minimally invasive experience for an ortho fellowship (these fellows felt more comfortable than any others I met doing microdiskectomies, paraspinal approaches, etc.). Very good basic science set-up with plenty of NIH funds."
The Rush faculty told me that they don't do much trauma at all. They don't cover Cook county anymore as a result of a staffing change. These fellows get a great deformity experience but they have a fair bit of scutwork themselves (weekend rounding two weekend per month, manually getting the patients up out of bed in the morning).
"Emory: surprisingly, very little trauma. Excellent faculty, very deformity and degenerative-based. Good research opportunities and great faculty made up or ortho and neurosurgeons. Cannot comment on their minimally invasive experience."
Emory does a ton of trauma. The fellows are the attendings of record at a level one trauma center in an inner city. Not only do they do a ton of trauma, but they cover heinous revision degen cases as well. I think the fellows actually get worked pretty hard here as well. Fellows here also make double the salary of any other fellowship around.
Future applicants should check these places out for themselves. What makes these places outstanding is that they have guys who are subsubspecialized (e.g. a dedicated C spine guy, deformity guy, tumor guy, neurosurgeon, and/or trauma guy) who teach you tricks. They also have a great hand-on surgical training.
You really can't go wrong with any of the top tier places (there are about 15 or so). The main problem is the lack of a match. It is ridiculous how competitive the programs become toward the end and how fast things move. You will not have a chance to see all of the programs that you want.
