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Syncrohnize said:
The extent a student’s love for a school can be plotted consistently vs. time.

During the beginning of 1st year, it’s at a relative peak as students are enthusiastic about all the things they heard on interview day and still have all their new classmates on pedestals. Then, students start getting bogged down by minutiae and other people scoring better than them and blame it on their school’s curriculum that focuses on minutiae and the competitive environment.

It rebounds a bit over summer as students start to miss school but then it plummets during second year until it reaches an all-time low during the second semester of second year when LCME-mandated activities interrupt student’s Step 1 studying.

It gradually increases to another relative peak as students get their Step 1s back and realize their school’s curriculum actually wasn’t terrible. It then starts to decline again as students miss honors and blame it on the school’s unfair grading policy and continues to plummet until interview season when they start going to other places and realizing things they took for granted from their home program.

Finally there’s a relative indifference until match day at which a student’s final level satisfaction is directly proportional to the quality of their match.
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There is so much truth to this post.

The epilogue is this - 6 months in to intern year, you've stopped considering yourself a product of your medical school anyways. Ebbs and flows of intern life lead to similar dissatisfaction with residency choice questioning if you're really learning anything...until the next batch of interns show up and you can't believe how dumb they are. After a month of answering the most basic of questions, you realize that you too must have been that dumb when you showed up and that you actually have learned something about patient care in the preceding year.

You settle into the grind of being an upper level resident, eventually being able to see a light at the end of the tunnel which is either fellowship or an attending position at which point you can't wait to escape the hell that is your residency program (your viewpoint of which has dimmed considerably). If you go on to a fellowship, the whole process repeats itself, though the period of feeling completely dumb lasts far longer (even though in truth you're a million times more competent than you were as an intern). But that hellhole you thought residency was, now seems like it was filled with rainbows and butterflies and there was so much that you took for granted. Fellowship satisfaction by the end is tied directly into how quickly you find a job.

And then it's done. You've actually completed the goal. There's no next step. Just the rest of your career. And as you get further and further out, you find that you don't really identify with your medical school anymore. Colleagues want to know where you trained but in the end care only in how you interact with them and take care of patients (or do research or serve as an administrator). And so, in the end you're either satisfied with your medical school because you're satisfied with your career, or you're not - but most likely, you are, because there's been so much time and so many decisions between graduation and a career that your medical school choice seems insignificant.

Edited to add - and then you go to your 10 year reunion and your former classmates are back on those pedestals, your medical school is achieving 'great' things that they want you to donate money to, and you're immensely satisfied with your choice except for that remaining student loan debt you still have hanging around. (At least that's how I think it will happen...ask me in 18 months)
 
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Chinese medical schools are fun, we have no safety standards; I enjoy handling strong acids without gloves and glasses and I also enjoy stepping over the blood on the floor in the anatomy labs. I'm really looking forward to operating on the stray dogs we get for surgery practice. I also like how all clinical subjects are open book, which means our senior students will 100% be top doctors and not be harmful at all in a hospital, probably explains why there's so many success stories from this place.

There is actually one positive, every single professor wants me to do research with them and correct the english so realistically I think I could get over 100 publications/name on things if I really pushed for it.
 
love mine, more for the people i've met than anything
the things that were annoying I rationalized away as universal to US training
the alternative (staying at the medical school in my home state, not being able to pursue medicine) was worse, so gratitude was always where I ended up. 🙂

caveat emptor: an MS4 who realizes where they went to med school probably opened up a lot of doors geographically. and who is also on elective/vacation for the foreseeable future check it
 
I really wonder what it must be like to like your classmates, the school, and its curriculum...Must be nice. I knew I should have scored higher on the MCAT -__-
 
I really like my med school - really some of the best times I had since graduating college. Not being facetious either -- really! Some profs were better than others, but I had a good group of people to study with, had a chance to do research all over the world, and some unique rotations (my Peds sub-I was camping in arizona for a month). Sure it was a grind some time and you get tired of feigning interest, but blocks/rotation were short enough (nothing longer than 2 months max) that you knew you could tough it out. Contrary to what many med students think, I actually use quite a bit of what I learned as an M1/M2/M3 in every day practice and think my med school did a good job of at least leading me to the firehose and helping me regulate the flow (so to speak).

My med school specializes in producing primary care docs, but still had excellent support from faculty to do external rotations in prestigious institutions and matched at my #1 rank (not in primary care). In hindsight, I have no complaints, and had <100K in student debt, so not to bad on that side either.
 
I love MCW too: Great clinical training, feel prepared (as much as one could be) for residency. Disclaimer - I only applied to 1 med school (MCW) so I really wanted to be here in the first place, but has not disappointed.
 
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