An additional reminder that equally biased aspirations based on minimal objective evidence (I.e also an opinion) when student performance and results have shown the absolute opposite is both misleading and unproductive for students that DO have the
choice between multiple medical schools AND students that will be applying later on in the cycles to come.
To add some positivity into your day, as I’ve said time and time again, USF is a decent MD program in the state of Florida that will get you where you want to go provided you work hard enough. It is in the top 4 in my personal list of all the Florida schools; I would personally go here over: NovaMD, FSU, FAU, FIU.
However, to make claims such as being “T30 bound” when the results have shown that it’s not in that trajectory is insincere. The program has problems and in order to eventually get where you (and the program) want to get, y’all need to recognize the flaws and see what exactly is causing them so the people running the program can give you the best education possible.
I think we over complicated/confused each others points, when in reality we would probably agree on the main issues.
USF is a good mid tier school, which we can agree on, yes? I have another acceptance at a solid mid tier school that I liked a lot, but I would probably pick USF instead in all likelihood because I see a possibility of a brighter future.
I agree with you that as of now, it is not at the level of UF (Forgive me if I don't know Florida schools very well), in which case the decision is easy, go to the school that has already hit top 30, instead of the one that is trying to move towards that.
However, for people with acceptances at other mid/lower tier schools like (I actually wrote a school name here but I decided against it since I don't want to diss another school), I think the possibility of USF's climb should make it the clear winner (at least for me).
So I think we over-complicated the discussion, when the choices are fairly clear and relatively binary in most cases, no need for a long drawn out battle where schools get dissed.
To add on to what a lot of people said, we don't know enough to really judge it's climb. One years match says little to be honest. I read through the match list: I saw a ton of good names like Vandy, NYU, Southwestern, Yale (and UCLA and UCSD which for me make my day!), etc. I'm not sure you can base the performance of a small group of hyper ambitious individuals for a competitive specialty from one school to another in one year and declare that the definitive conclusion to how USF's climb is going (which will probably take a decade for a definitive answer). Those 7 individuals at USF for say Ortho are a tiny sample size: who knows what was up with them, just because they were part of the first "high scoring" class, does not mean they were somehow perfect. Literally all we know about them was that they got around 517 (even I got an MCAT higher than that, and all that part of my application says about me is that I spent 4-5 months cramming, it's not even close to being the most relevant and compelling part of my application), they might have been mediocre otherwise, does not mean the program let them down.
Nobody said it is currently a top 30. Reputations like that take years to build. But you should be optimistic to attend a school that is at least trying, and has the money and resources to do it! Most schools, like one of my other A's, I'm betting have already peaked. But it's exciting to attend a school that definitely has not peaked yet (regardless of where it will end up landing, the one thing I can guarantee is that it has not come close to peaking).
Where it goes, nobody knows. Maybe it really does have some serious networking issue (perhaps PD's are upset at USF staff). But we don't know that, and we won't even get an idea until Second Look. Until then, it's all postulating, and I'm personally not worried.
