For applicants

Who this fellowship is for

Reconstructive fellowships are not interchangeable, and the useful comparison between them is the shape of the year rather than the size of the total. This one has a particular shape. Stating it plainly costs the program a few applicants and saves the rest a bad year.

Mapped to the four GURS categories, the 2025-2026 program volume was 253 genital reconstruction, 131 abdominal and pelvic reconstruction, 98 urethral reconstruction, and 68 genitourinary prosthetics. These are program operative cases, not a fellow’s logged total. That ordering is the program: the year is weighted toward genital reconstruction and toward abdominal and pelvic robotic reconstruction, and urethral reconstruction sits inside that work rather than defining it.

So this is not a urethroplasty a day. If the highest possible urethroplasty count is your goal, say so early in the process, because it is not the shape of this year.

What the year is built to teach is how to do a large reconstructive operation well and how to do it efficiently. Those are different skills from repetition of a single index case, and they are the two that decide whether a complex reconstruction is feasible in your own practice afterward. Efficiency here means the operation, the room, and the day: how the case is planned, how it is set up, and how the steps are ordered so that the hard part is reached with time and tissue still in hand.

Robotic surgery is the default approach rather than a rotation, on multi-port and single-port platforms. An applicant who wants robotic reconstruction to be how they operate will get exactly that. An applicant who wants a predominantly open year will not.

There is one operative faculty member. The fellow operates with the fellowship director across the full scope of the year rather than rotating among a roster, so the coaching is continuous and the standard is consistent. The tradeoff is a single set of technical preferences rather than several.

The fellow works as a junior faculty member: booking cases, making the clinical decisions, taking attending call at roughly the director’s frequency. That is the point of the year. It is also a real workload, and it is fair to ask the current fellow what it feels like in February.

What the year does not cover is worth as much of an applicant’s attention. This is a subspecialty year, not a general urology year. Oncology and endourology exposure is minimal. The fellowship is not ACGME accredited. None of that is a defect, but all of it should be known before ranking rather than after.