general trends on state school vs "more prestigious"

[md-2020]

I completely believe you that you like UMD-B and that you would be happy there. Given that you focused very top-heavy and are an ultra-competitive applicant (not to mention being a highly competitive athlete) I have a feeling you didn't apply to Harvard, Stanford, Hopkins, etc, etc as back-ups for UMD-B. Let's be real here. What I'd to love for you to address are my original questions. And let's take my distorted list as a guide. If all your top-tiers were out of the picture, would you strongly consider picking Case, BU, Emory, or Einstein over UMD-B??? In other words, where you would you put your own inflection point at?

Well obviously. But that does not mean I'll blindly go there regardless of how the rest of my cycle shakes out.

Case, BU, Emory, Einstein vs free @ UMD? UMD, definitely.

I was pointing out that especially Case and Emory are definitely within the realm of upper tier med schools.

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[Nietzschelover]

Well obviously. But that does not mean I'll blindly go there regardless of how the rest of my cycle shakes out.

Case, BU, Emory, Einstein vs free @ UMD? UMD, definitely.

I was pointing out that especially Case and Emory are definitely within the realm of upper tier med schools.

OK, thanks. As a side note (and I had this thought before), you may want to consider how specific you are with identifiers and stated preferences in your profile. I would think you are fairly identifiable (given state of origin, MCAT score, 2 sport D1, Ivy league, etc, etc).

 

[StudyLater]

At every step of my life, I chose the money over the prestige.
- public high school
- public university on full ride
- med school w/scholarship

All I can say is that I now have almost unparalleled freedom with what I do next in my life. Every country in the world wants American physicians and, due to my lack of debt, I can afford to move anywhere.

Has this ever hurt me? I'll certainly never be able to say I went to HYPSM, but people at those schools are usually too self conscious to say they even went there. I'd rather hang out with my friends and watch our boys do the big dance in March than stare at a fancy diploma on the wall.

If anything, choosing these options has helped. When someone invests $ in you, they are expecting you to succeed. When you take the $, you enter a school where you can separate yourself from the pack and where the faculty will do almost anything to help you succeed. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't have changed a thing (except maybe better results in March)

Massively jelly of your awesome situation.

 

[Nietzschelover]

On another note, much has been written on SDN about high stats applicants being screened out of interviews because those schools do not believe those students will attend if offered, as well as TX applicants finding OOS love difficult. In deciding how to dole their II's do schools seriously weigh the odds of the student coming there if offered, and how do they do that? Will a place like Wake or NYMC or GWU presume that a student they might like will get an offer and choose an IS public and therefore not issue a II?

Bump. Anyone?

 

[Banco]

It varies by personal situation. There is no rule that says you must choose the school based off of an arbitrary cutoff in rankings.

I preferred my state school over some of the top 20s I interviewed at. There were certain top 20s that I thought were much better than other top 20s. Location, price, feel, student body, curriculum, mission etc. all mattered. It really depends.

 

[Nietzschelover]

How do mid-lower and lower private med schools decide who to interview, assuming candidates are very competitive for their schools? And in deciding whether to give a II do they consider what they think is the likelihood of the candidate attending their school based on geography, state schools available to the candidate, and any other factors?

 

[22031 Alum]

The survey that people always quote, which says that private med schools consider undergrad prestige of "highest importance"- was on a 4-point Likert scale, for crying out loud. The difference between a given factor being "meh" and "super important" could be three or four more people answering '4' than answering '3'. I feel like we need to have a journal club on survey design and how much weight the results should be given.

Edit- I may or may not be bitter about having to deal with poor survey design in other areas of my life.