• Samuel Hall, Jonny R Stephens, Matthew A Myers, Ahmad Elmansouri, Kate Geoghegan, Charlotte H Harrison, Eva Nagy, Deepika Anbu, William J C Parton, December R Payne, Eleanor Seaby, and Scott Border.
• Centre for Learning Anatomical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK; Department of Neurosurgery, Wessex Neurological Centre, University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UK. Electronic address: Samuel.hall@doctors.org.uk.
• World Neurosurg. 2020 Jan 1; 133: e535-e539.

BackgroundNeurosurgery is a notoriously difficult career to enter and requires medical students to engage in extracurricular activities to demonstrate their commitment to the specialty. The National Undergraduate Neuroanatomy Competition (NUNC) was established in 2013 as a means for students to display this commitment as well as academic ability.MethodsA bespoke 22-item questionnaire was designed to determine career outcomes and the role of competition attendance in job applications. It was distributed using the SurveyMonkey website to the 87 attendees at the 2013 and 2014 competitions.ResultsResponses were received by 40 competitors (response rate, 46.0%). Twenty-four responders (60.0%) intended to pursue a career in either neurosurgery (n = 18) or neurology (n = 6). This included 10 responders (25.0%) who had successfully entered either neurosurgery (n = 9) or neurology (n = 1). The performance of these 10 was significantly better than the other responders (57.0 ± 13.6% vs. 46.5 ± 13.5% [n = 30]; P = 0.036). Seventeen responders (42.5%) either included their attendance at NUNC in a post-Foundation job application or intend to.ConclusionsThe NUNC provides the opportunity for medical students to demonstrate their interest in neurosurgery. It has the potential to be used as a tool for recognizing medical students suitable for neurosurgery training.Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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