Does the med. school choice affect residency options?

[Dynastar]

Does the "prestige" of the medical school give you more options in residency??

Let's say you're about average at a top medical school and therefore, you're rank and grades aren't as good as if you went to a lower tier school. Does this affect what residencies you get??

I realize that boards are the main thing, but morale wise, I think it would be frustrating to be competing against the "gunners" at one school and being free of those insanely intelligent people at another.

Any comments?

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[merlin]

I know that this is not going answer the question that you have posed, but I think it would be wise to say to you that there will be incredibly smart "gunners" at lower tier schools that did in fact pass up your "top tier" schools to go to whatever lower tier school they are at. And also you have to remember that many schools nowadays (sp?) work on a pass/fail system for the first two years and so academic performance is only personally motivated. I am fairly certain that Yale even goes so far as to give optional anonymous tests for all med students. So, I know that this is rambling but I just wanted to make the point that it is not a given that you are going to get lower grades going to a top tier school because of this common misconception that students at top tier schools are smarter and you will get higher grades by going to a lower tier school because students at lower tier schools at not as motivated, dumber.... In my experience in medical school so far, every test we always have a couple people who fail. Now, I doubt there is any medical student out there, even going to a "lower tier" school, that got into medical school by failing tests.
But to answer your question, there most likely is some element of prestige that is factored into where you match for residency. Cheers.

 

[md-student]

A lot depends on what you decide to specialize in. Competition varies widely. Also depends on where (geographically) you would like to do your residency. A lot of it is networking and politics.

A top tier private school may open some doors for you that a state school cannot, but this is probably for a small subset of cases. Remember, you can be a big fish in a little pond or vice versa. You're going to be compared to your classmates. USMLE Step I and II is the great "equalizer", and you can contact the schools you're interested in to see how their students do on average. You can get a good education at a lot of schools not considered top tier...and if you work hard enough (just like you would have to at a top tier school) you can get whatever residency you want.

 

[Bonds756]

Originally posted by Dynastar

Let's say you're about average at a top medical school and therefore, you're rank and grades aren't as good as if you went to a lower tier school. Does this affect what residencies you get??

From my understanding, in everyone's dean's letter, your whole four years comes down to just one word: Outstanding, Excellent, or Very Good. And tops schools generally give out more outstandings and excellents than lower ranked schools since they feel that their students who are "only" very good would be excellent or outstanding at other institutions. Whether this is a correct assumption or not, I think that is how it goes.