bleargh, Elijah05, metallica81788, MiniMoo, DuckFook, and Jihad:
I find your lack of tact and inability to appreciate another (highly accomplished) applicant's understandable concern not only distasteful and insensitive but downright pathetic. Whereas BlueDevilMed's post was none of these things, nor was it insulting or condescending, your posts were, largely, all of the above.
BlueDevilMed:
I hope that you will ignore each of these posters' responses. I don't have an answer to your question, and in fact am wondering something similar. Exactly how important is rank in selecting a school? Congratulations on your impressive accomplishments, and hopefully someone with even a marginal interest in helping you will respond here.
Its a somewhat ridic question to ask. Hes in at 2 of the best schools in the country...hes essentially asking, if i choose columbia is my career going to suck? Its an insane question. Both schools are top ranked and give an excellent education. Both place students at their top residency positions consistantly. Whether you are interested in internal medicine, academic medicine, or trauma surgery all are amazing. Heres what all these threads come down too..
1) Money - does it matter to you yes or no. Look at the financials
2) location - do you hate NYC? do you hate boston? Do you hate the cold? Etc etc
3) prestige - this guy seems to care about that alot. Theres going to be a very marginal difference in his residency options regardless of where he goes. If he honors his 3rd year, does well on step 1, and gets good LOR (both schools can offer this too him if he has the intiative) then hes going to likely get what he wants regardless.
4) cirriculum - do you like a ton of pbl, more standard, how do the 2 differ? A better question to ask maybe how the 3rd year rotations and beyond are set up. Do you get a lot of hands on experience, does the school tend to produce students that are more ready to hit the ground running intern year? What about away or intl rotations. However no pre med is probably going to know this. Another reason threads like this are not always the most helpful. The students with most insight M3-M4 arent answering.
5) gut feeling - wth did you feel like when there. Will you be happy for 4 years?
The question of which school gets you a better residency between these two is honestly a useless one. The reason these threads are somewhat useless as basically the OP typically wants to show off their success (which is fine) or basically wants people to agree with a decision they have already made. There is taht "helpful" enough. I just outlined the 5 thigns that are talked about in EVERY SINGLE thread ever made like this.
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Also just on another note its of very little importance what school you went to as far as residency directors are often concerned. Its more like have they had good experiences with med students from that school. Some ivies believe it or not do not always have the best reputations of producing the best clinicians and intern ready people. If residency director Smith has had several succesful students who are good interns from school X and only bad experiences with school Y, regardless of prestige hes likely to take a harder look at those from school X.
