The Bumpy Path to Successful Academic Surgery: A Roadmap for the Surgical Resident

Perseverance is central to a successful career in aca-demic surgery [2] . The acquisition of patient data and subsequent analysis can be extremely tedious and frus-trating. Moreover, only rarely do manuscripts or grant submissions meet with immediate success. In many cas-es, acceptance is contingent upon major revisions, or even more likely, the article will simply be rejected out of hand. It is essential that the aspiring academic surgeon remains undiscouraged by these setbacks and continues resolutely in his or her course of action. The authors, themselves, experienced having a manuscript rejected multiple times by high-quality journals before it was fi-nally published. It would have been easy to abandon this manuscript in profound frustration after the third or fourth rejection, but the authors were convinced that the article had real merit and should be offered to the surgi-cal community. In another instance, one of the authors submitted an article to a high-impact factor, peer-reviewed surgical journal, which was summarily rejected. Persistence, how-ever, paid off: when the author carefully read the review-ers’ remarks, he found that some of the comments that had prompted the rejection of the paper were, in his esti-A c areer in academic surgery can be a challenging un-dertaking, with many potentially daunting hurdles to overcome. What does it take to succeed in the field of academic surgery? Which aspects are needed to excel as an academic surgeon?T he objective of the following short article [1] i s to pro-vide a guide for the surgical resident who has the desire and enthusiasm to become an academic surgeon.