alibubble said:
Thanks for the responses so far! One of the schools is located on/at a hospital, but the other is not. However, the one without the hospital has great rotation sites. I guess bad lectures can't be so bad-- in the end, it's our responsibility to learn the material despite any insufficiencies in how the info is presented.
So, the name of the school matters, but my board scores will matter more in the acquisition of a residency? Also, the clinical education during third and fourth year will be more immediately relevant to residency than the first two years of med school education-- assuming I have mastered everything from the first two years?
Hmmm... makes the choice very difficult. Did anybody here have a really tough decision to make when considering which school to pick?
hmm. . .from what i've realized--ANY school, from HMS to the caribbean schools, is going to have good lectures and bad lectures. The most famous name profs aren't always the best teachers/lecturers--this i know from personal experience.
Sometimes an idolized persona in any field turns out to be the worst lecturer ever and too removed from students' level thinking to explain things clearly, and it turns out one of his/her "nobody" grad students ends up being the most valuable resource that helped you understand some complicated concept.
Unfortunately, med school no longer has TAs (at least not at my med school), no more things like "office hours", no problem sets. It's all just reading and memorizing/learning. The concepts aren't profound by any means. It just up to you to get through it all in time for the exam. I ended up not even wasting time in lecture, b/c no matter how good or bad it was, all i needed to do was sit down by myself and pour over the material. I'm a slow reader, so I couldn't afford to spend 3-6 hours a day sitting in lectures that didn't even cover everything we needed to know and that I only retained like 5-10% from.
Thus, I'd say of all things, the "quality" of the lectures in preclinical years means NOTHING. In terms of judging quality of a school's curriculum, I'd recommend looking at whether they involve small group/PBL learning, what exactly the PBLs at a particular school entail, when do you start rotations (3rd year vs before 3rd year). I think the quality of clinical experience is far more important b/c you're less dependent on yourself for learning. The variety of pathology, diversity of patient population, technology avail in the hospital, whether its a level I trauma center, the quality of residents, do you have to fight over rotations with other med schools or PA schools. . .those are all very important to keep in mind while looking for a good clinical education at a med school, imo
Also keep in mind that it could be that the school that's overhauling its curriculum is making a significant improvement over what was in place before. My school just overhauled its preclinical curriculum last year, which eliminated a lot of redundancy (e.g. we had a 3 week micro course, and then in a few months, we had another 2-week course on infectious disease
😛 ), allowing students to start rotations in the spring of MS2 instead of beginning of MS3. That way, students would be taking Step 1 with some clinical experience under their belts (unlike my class). Med schools that have already been doing this (Baylor, Penn, Duke) tend to do better on Step 1 than schools that dont (like HMS, which still does well, but not quite as well).
Another thing is that if you choose a med school with a lot of residency programs, first of all you get to experience what it would be like as a resident, more so than if you rotate at some community hospitals that don't belong to the school itself, that don't have any residents. Second of all, often the residency programs at one's home med school will have some preference for their own students, if not outright, then simply b/c programs often prefer to stick with applicant whom they know and have worked with in the past. So, choosing on the basis of quality of residency programs at that particular school is a good idea too.
