Context: Given the well-documented shortage of physicians in primary care and several other specialties, quantitative understanding of residency application and matching data among osteopathic and allopathic medical students has implications for predicting trends in the physician workforce.Objectives: To estimate medical student interest in neurology and psychiatry based on numbers of applicants and matches to neurology and psychiatry osteopathic and allopathic residency programs. Also, to gauge students' previous academic experience with brain and cognitive sciences. interest in neurology and psychiatry, the number of positions, applicants, and matches were analyzed considering the number of total osteopathic and allopathic graduates in the given year using 2-tailed χ 2 analyses with Yates correction. In addition, osteopathic and allopathic medical schools' websites were reviewed to determine whether neurology and psychiatry rotations were required. Osteopathic medical students' reported undergraduate majors were also gathered. Results:Compared with allopathic medical students, osteopathic medical students had significantly greater interest (as measured by applicants) in neurology (χ Nearly 10% of osteopathic applicants and matriculants had undergraduate coursework in brain and cognitive sciences. Conclusion:Osteopathic medical students demonstrated greater interest than allopathic medical students in neurology and psychiatry based on the proportion of residency program applicants but similar interests as measured by matches. Required rotations did not appear to influence students' interests.

It is recognized that medical school curricula contain significant microbiology-related content as part of the training of future physicians who will be responsible stewards of antimicrobials. Surprisingly, osteopathic and allopathic medical schools do not require pre-medical microbiology coursework, and the extent to which medical students have completed microbiology coursework remains poorly understood. In this report, we show that fewer than 3% of applicants and matriculants to osteopathic medical school (OMS) have completed an undergraduate major or minor in microbiology, and fewer than 17% of applicants and matriculants to OMS have completed one or more microbiology-related courses. These data demonstrate limited pre-medical microbiology-related knowledge among osteopathic medical students, which may be associated with an increase in perceived stress when learning this content or during clinical rotations as well as a potential lack of interest in pursuing a career in infectious diseases.

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