Getting into a specialty residency?

[DoctorB]

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I have been reading that one needs to be in the top 10-15% of his or her class in order to get into a specialty residency. Does "class" mean the medical schools graduating class or the overall applicants. I ask this because I assume it is much easier to be top ten percent at an average medical school than Harvard. Just something I would like to know when preparing my list of schools to apply too.

 

[akaz]

I have been reading that one needs to be in the top 10-15% of his or her class in order to get into a specialty residency. Does "class" mean the medical schools graduating class or the overall applicants. I ask this because I assume it is much easier to be top ten percent at an average medical school than Harvard. Just something I would like to know when preparing my list of schools to apply too.

It depends what specialty.. If you look at the match lists. Places like Harvard, Colmbia, Yale, Cornell etc have alot more than 10-15% get the hard to match specialties. They have about 40-65% of the class. Check match lists and who is known at what school for what you are interested.

 

[WatchingWaiting]

I have been reading that one needs to be in the top 10-15% of his or her class in order to get into a specialty residency. Does "class" mean the medical schools graduating class or the overall applicants. I ask this because I assume it is much easier to be top ten percent at an average medical school than Harvard. Just something I would like to know when preparing my list of schools to apply too.

That's a bunkus statistic. First off, what is a "specialty" residency? Psychiatry is a specialty-- it's not hard to get into, it's not well-paid, it does feature flexible hours and potentially interesting pt population, depending on your mindset. Neurosurgery, OTOH, is a specialty that is very hard to get into, very challenging, very time-consuming, and very well-compensated. Over 1/2 of US M.D. graduates go into non-primary care specialties, which is probably what term you're actually going for.

In terms of your overall question, it is probably easier to get into top academic programs coming out of top med schools, but not that much easier (this is hard to calculate though, because the average student coming out of a top school has higher Step 1 scores, more research, in addition to connections to better faculty than the average student coming out of a lower-tier school, so merely having a match list with more competitive matches doesn't necessarily mean the more competitive matches are due to the med school itself rather than the brighter/more industrious students). And, if you're willing to match into community programs, it's not that hard to get into much of anything if you're in the top 50% even at a lower-tier school. The real secret of the match is that ~16000 MDs are competing for ~24000 residency slots. MDs are higher on the food chain than those who fill the surplus 8000 or so slots, so, residency is not competitive in the same way that M.D. applications are (where there are at least 2 students competing for each slot, and when you include the number of people weeded out by the MCAT or by the pre-med curriculum, the number is more like 3 to 1 or 10 to 1, respectively).

 

[WatchingWaiting]

It depends what specialty.. If you look at the match lists. Places like Harvard, Colmbia, Yale, Cornell etc have alot more than 10-15% get the hard to match specialties. They have about 40-65% of the class. Check match lists and who is known at what school for what you are interested.

This depends on what you mean by "harder to match specialties." It's a lot harder to match into IM at MGH than to match into radiology at a community hospital. I'd say if you include either matches in competitive specialties or matches at competitive programs, the percentage would be more like ~80%. It's also worth remembering that the non-competitive IM match is the pathway into the pretty competitive Cardiology, GI, and the like fellowships.