@almostinder That’s completely the vibe I got from the rankings, but just wondering what I should use to determine differences in resources available/prestige of the school. Not that it’s a determining factor but it’s nice to have that factor when weighing schools against each other. Are the residency director rankings more useful?
I think director rankings are marginally better, but functionally not much different than USNWR, tbh. Unfortunately, you have to do a lot of extra work to see if a school has what you're looking for. If you're huge on research, look at funding and publications (US Global rankings is actually pretty decent at this bc it is quantitative and takes into account funding, publications, citations, and collaboration).
If you're only interested in prestige, USNWR is not too bad bc a huge portion of their calculation is opinion-based.
But for actual clinical opportunities, you have to talk to folks at the schools. In my opinion, UCSF is probably the best, most well-rounded school out there. Excellent research, specialty exposure, primary care (this is big because a lot of "top" schools are mediocre here), etc. Some of the best schools are a bit underrated imo because the rankings favor private schools.
Also the corresponding hospital is a big factor in my opinion. Perfect example is NYC and Chicago are huge cities with lots of diverse patient populations and interesting cases, but there are also MANY medical schools in those cities. In contrast, Atlanta is not quite as large as NYC and Chicago, but Emory only has competition with one other med school and it wasn't established until like 1975.
I am a firm believer that you just gotta try schools out and see how you personally like them and how they fit you..and I don't think you can go wrong that way.