Med school reputation for PSTP residencies? Trying to choose school

[bluer]

I'm an incoming medical student interested into going into some IM subspecialty, and am trying to choose between a medical school like Johns Hopkins/ UCSF/ Harvard and a top 20 medical school. I will be making a significant personal sacrifice if I choose to go to the more prestigious school and am unsure if the increase in professional benefits is significant enough to offset this.

To give you an idea of my future goals, even though I'm not going the MD/PhD route I want to go into academic medicine and make research a substantial part of my career (anywhere from 80 to 50%). I'm planning on taking a research year in medical school. I would like to match to a good research fast-track residency at a place with a lot of leading figures to get mentorship from.

The match list for the more prestigious school is absolutely ridiculous in IM, it looks like almost all of them get top residencies including more than half at UCSF/BWH/MGH/JHH. The top 20 school's match list is definitely not bad, but it's more all across the board, with a small fraction ending up at the big 4, a good chunk getting good residencies , and a few matching at lesser known places that I don't see at all on the other match list . So it seems like you have to be at the top of your class to end up at a top place (as I would expect for most med schools).

Does this same success of placement in regular IM programs also extend to PSTP/short track research programs? Does the name mean that much? If that's really the case then I might be willing to make the personal sacrifice for my long-term career goals.

Given my career goal of working at an academic medical center and hopefully being a leading researcher/clinician in my work, how much does this matter? If I just wanted to be a private practice clinician, I would choose the medical school where I wouldn't have to make a personal sacrifice, but I'm hesitant because I have more specific career goals where pedigree and who you directly work with/train under seem to be more important.

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[psf73]

I have no clue but for what it's worth I chose a 12-16 ranked school over two 2-6th ranked schools just because I felt the level of support, the curriculum, and the research were a better focus at the lower rank school. I think once you get into top 20 it doesn't matter that much and its more about what you make of the experience and the contacts and recommendations you can find. However I'm doing MSTP so that might make more of a difference because I'm also looking at potential PhD mentors. I also value happiness over extreme success. But I would just evaluate your priorities and go with your gut.

 

[soporific]

My impression from looking at "top" research residencies is that the vast majority are MD/PhDs. Those that aren't came from a really prestigious medical school like UCSF/JH/Harvard and did a gap year for research with funding from HHMI, Doris Duke or the like.

 

[solitude]

impossible question to answer without more specifics about your "personal sacrifices". In general, other things being equal, I advocate going to the most prestigious program at all stages of training. But you will find that as you age, prestige becomes less important than whether you can make it home to spend time with your family. You will probably change your mind about residency in med school. You will likely even change your mind about doing a research residency...sorry, but just saying it is likely to be the case. Even at top med schools (I went to one), plenty of people do not match as well as you would expect. And plenty of people match very, very well at mediocre med schools.