discrimination against MD/PhD students in academia

[gbwillner]

Performance on clinical rotations appears to be more contingent on certain other "soft" skills, such as being able to show enthusiasm and detail-orientedness.

Performance in PhD (and beyond) is essentially tied to mentors with the most proven past track record of producing high-profile researchers (i.e. pedigree). However, for the MOST part, such track record is either not available or not very good, even though I would say most mentors are still decent. So it becomes more of a guessing game. This is a more of a product of the intrinsic risky nature of PhD training.

I did state directly after that statement that the difficulty in medicine after the memorizing is putting all that knowledge to practical use in the treatment of patients. Regardless, most agree that the #1 criteria for success in the match game is your Step1 score, which is entirely based on these "soft" skills.

Re: your second point, I think this is an accurate reflection of how to have perceived success in terms of quality of papers... publishing in Nature/Science/Cell is far more predicted by WHO your mentors are than any type of actual difficulty with progress.

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