I've been staff, student, and/or volunteer in multiple branches of the UMDNJ system for a few years. I will be attending NJMS in the fall.
The chair of the AMA is the chair of neurosurgery at NJMS, and the chair of the AMA student section is an NJMS MD MPH student. Medical students and faculty from all medical school attend AMA meetings, where these two, among others, make speeches for the medical community. NJMS has enjoyed strong national recognition from our leaders and their positions in national organizations.
NJMS annually enjoys a strong match list, with students placing at top hospitals like MGH/B&W/Spaulding (Harvard), Barnes Jewish (WUSTL), Yale New Haven, NY Presbyterian (Columbia/Cornell), etc.
I'm going to talk about some things I've experiences through my time with NJMS. I recently sat in on a second year pharmacology lecture. The guest speaker was Dr. Robert Mitchell, state medical examiner in charge, for New Jersey. He started off the lecture by saying how lucky everyone was to be at NJMS, how the clinical experience is top notch because of the area the hospital is in and the hands on, start day one, approach to clinical training. It seemed like a pretty typical type of speech, but he went on. He talked about his experience in residency, saying that in his residency group there were students from Harvard and Mayo Clinic. It became apparent at the beginning of his residency training that he had been much better prepared and trained procedure-wise than those students, and he began teaching those students from top medical schools tips and tricks in the clinical setting. He was later chosen chief resident of his program, and has certainly made a name for himself in his field.
Indeed, clinical training is an oft-stated strength of NJMS. The student-run clinic is unique in that medical students take part in it starting their first year (first month really) of medical school. It is an elective and you get to choose how little or how much time you dedicate to patient work - even as a first year medical student. The emergency room is the only level one trauma center in New Jersey. As a volunteer there, I witnessed an incredible scene that epitomizes the clinical training experience at NJMS. There was a gunshot victim, immediately sped into trauma. It was some point between June and July, and I had just introduced myself to a 3rd year med student in the ER who was just starting his first rotation, and just had taken STEP 1. 15 minutes later he is doing chest compressions in a trauma bay during emergency surgery. In this lies the best kept secret of choosing a medical school. If you are a patient, you choose the best medical center for being treated by top physicians (and you do not pay top dollar to let med students play around with you). If you are a prospective medical student, one strategy is to choose the place that will make you the best clinician. This is an area in which NJMS strives. Regarding bench and clinical research, I have been lucky enough to work with multiple bench researchers at the school, leading to publications. If you are a med student - it is not a matter of luck getting published. It is very easy to link up with clinical and bench research groups, and there are $3000 stipends for medical student research. I recall a first year med student shooting one email to Dr. Alland (at the time one of the most in-the-news medical researchers in the country due to his TB breakthrough
http://goo.gl/Pq2vi ), and the next day receiving an offer to work with a project in his lab. That is the status quo; the amount of pubs you get before graduating is up to how much time you want to put into clinical and/or bench research, it will never be a matter of not getting an offer. Good luck to everyone making choices, you really can't go wrong - medical school is 9 parts how hard you work and 1 part where you are.
