Mayo Clinic offers numerous educational opportunities throughout your General Surgery Residency and sets you up for success after you have graduated. We offer a wide variety of didactic experiences as well as heavy simulation practice, particularly in the early years of training. More than 50,000 operations a year are performed at Mayo Clinic with a voluminous range of cases. Therefore, your operative experience will be abundant. You will be able to take part in these cases from the very beginning of your training, and take part in hands-on, surgical learning in procedures ranging from standard to complicated.

Teamwork is a hallmark at Mayo, along with access to specialists in virtually any area of medicine. The connections to specialties and their relevant fellowships across the country are wide-reaching. The resources for engaging in research in any of these specialties are limitless.

Rochester is a beautiful city that has been consistently ranked among the most livable places in the United States. Mayo Clinic values and protects the balance of work, education and personal life, so you will have the opportunity to take advantage of the relaxed lifestyle of Rochester.

Above all, our dedication to compassionate, excellent patient care is rooted in tradition and internationally recognized as unparalleled. You will learn from the world experts in medicine and emulate their meticulous and dedicated care.

Designed to educate the leaders of tomorrow, we use our history as a blueprint and continue to follow the principles that have guided us since Mayo Clinic’s inception more than 150 years ago. We are driven by science, energized by education, and relentlessly focused on patient care.

From common to complex, our residents do more and have access to more. They interact with diverse patient populations with a broad spectrum of medical conditions in multiple care settings.

From the program director

Welcome to the Mayo Clinic General Surgery Residency program. We have an outstanding accredited five-year residency training program at one of the premier medical centers in the United States.

The Mayo Clinic General Surgery Residency program offers a broad experience in general surgery and its subspecialties. Graduates are well-prepared to enter private practice, academic practice, or go on to subspecialty fellowship training at the end of their time here. Residents get a wealth of clinical experience in addition to an incredible depth of research endeavors.

Our educational program focuses on creating the "whole surgeon." We expect our graduates to be technically outstanding while also incredibly astute clinical decision-makers. Our education program is robust and is known for its preceptorship concept, which many of the General Surgery services run upon. You have the opportunity to work one-on-one with some of the world's best surgeons.

You are invited to read what our current residents are saying about our program. By hearing what those experienced residents have to say, you will gain an appreciation of the depth and breadth of our training program.

We encourage you to look into the incredible wealth of experiences offered by our program.

Mariela Rivera, M.D.
General Surgery Residency Program Director