← all questions · Burnout and leaving
Several colleges decide it for you. Plastics allows three eligible attempts and publishes the odds — 15.19% get on at the first attempt, 10.95% at the second, 4.24% at the third 1. Neurosurgery caps at four, extendable to six 2. Where there is no cap, the test is whether you are getting closer, not whether you still want it.
Some of this is not your decision. Plastic surgery allows three eligible attempts and is the one specialty that publishes the attempt-by-attempt yield: across 2020–2024, 31.45% of applicants were ever selected — 15.19% first attempt, 10.95% second, 4.24% third 1. Neurosurgery allows four attempts, plus one each time you reach final ranking, capped at six 2. Cardiothoracic allows three eligible attempts, counting only applications that reached interview 3. General surgery and orthopaedics set no attempt limit at all 3 — which sounds generous and is the trap, because nothing external ever tells you to stop.
The question that actually discriminates is trajectory, not desire. Are you reaching interview? Are your referee scores improving? Is the gap between you and the ranked cohort closing? If you have never reached interview after two attempts, the problem is structural and another year of the same job will not fix it. If you are being ranked and narrowly missing, the published attempt curves say persistence is rational.
Year-to-year variance is real and should stop you over-reading one rejection. Neurosurgery selected 13% of applicants in 2024 and 34.7% in 2026 2. One unsuccessful round is noise; three is a signal.
Count the cost each year, not once. The recurring first-hand framing in the corpus is that the sacrifice compounds — and that the people already at the "good bit" often did not look happy. That is a legitimate input, not weakness.
Two warnings the sub gives and the colleges don't. Do not treat GP as the automatic plan B; it is a different job with its own exams and it is now competitive on its own terms. And do not put your life on hold while you wait — a house, a partner, a child and an unaccredited year are not mutually exclusive 5.
If you are making this decision while exhausted, call Drs4Drs on 1300 374 377 first 4. Deciding your career from inside burnout is the one thing everyone who has done it says not to do.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
I'd also advise against thinking of GP as your plan B by default.
I think that each year you stick with it you have to reassess whether the long-term reward is good enough to justify the cost.
I think if you're making progress I.e. getting to interview stages and references are glowing id say exhaust your attempts.
Also - nothing is stopping you from settling down and getting on with life if you're still unaccredited and trying.
If you can't get on by strike 3, maybe its for the best. No point constantly holding on to an unobtainable dream and driving yourself crazy in the process
Asked 12 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /(give up|call it|move on|quit|stop).{0,40}(specialt|training|surgery|dream|applying)|(reject|unsuccessful).{0,35}(training|again)/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring answers in the PGY7 'how do I know when to call it' thread, selected so the 'exhaust your attempts' position, the 'three strikes' position and the first-hand account of leaving surgery for radiology all appear together.