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This question is about surgeon education.
What degree do you need to be a surgeon?
You need a doctoral-level medical degree to be a surgeon. If you want to be a surgeon, you're looking at a long journey just to get your career started. Assuming you finish your bachelor's degree on time, you're looking at eight years of schooling - four for your undergraduate degree and another four for medical school.
For an aspiring surgeon, when it comes to getting your bachelor's, you can major in any major as long as you complete the pre-medical courses either as electives or as part of their chosen degree field, but human physiology, health science, and human biology are the most common undergraduate majors for surgeons.
After you graduate from medical school, you begin the first year of your residency, also known as your internship year. All told, surgical residencies will last for a minimum of five years, and residencies in some surgical specialties take as long as seven years to complete, according to the American College of Surgeons.
Surgeons spend longer on residency training than many other types of doctors, for whom residency may take as little as three years.
Physicians must also complete licensing exams to be fully qualified to practice medicine, and this requires taking exams like the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) or the Comprehensive Osteopathic Medical Licensing Examination (COMLEX).
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