- Joined
- Aug 16, 2010
- Messages
- 1,204
- Reaction score
- 80
At least for me, it's a way to see what's out there in the future (as in what schools have residency programs in which specialties - obviously this can also be found via FREIDA) and maybe see what kind of specialties students at the school lean toward. I totally get that you can't tell from a match list if people are getting into the programs/specialties they want and that the distribution of matches is always class-dependent.So what exactly are you pre-meds doing with a match list? You can't glean anything useful from it. You can only see what the relative distribution of specialties is, but even that isn't very helpful. You can't say that just because a school matches 50% of its class into IM or peds that it is biased towards primary care, because you don't know what the career plans are of the matchees, and if they have fellowship aspirations. Nor are you in a position to evaluate the caliber of programs that people match to. Yes, Harvard, Hopkins, Mayo and Stanford are great programs, but not for every discipline.
I always get a kick out of seeing these threads where those without direct experience in matching and ranking programs then extrapolate a rank list into a de facto evaluation of a given institution's educational caliber.
I can't speak for anyone else here of course, but those are just a couple reasons it's interesting to me. This isn't even including just general camaraderie and interest in the state of your chosen school.