Happyswimmingawg
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How do I choose a medical school?
- Thread starter Happyswimmingawg
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Hollow Knight
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Congratulations. TL;DR: go to your in-state MD school, without mandatory attendance if possible.
1. What's the cost? you can go to a private school and pay $400,000, but if you do that, specialties like IM, peds, and FM aren't impossible, but it makes it harder to pay off that kind of debt. Also, you may be dead set on dermatology or something high paying like that, but in med school, everyone is at least as smart as you I promise. Don't go to a hyper expensive school banking on making derm money
2. Mandatory attendance is awful, and even if you like the team based learning format, it should be optional. Trust me on this. My classmates who were back in the classroom 3 days after delivering their first child were pissed that they weren't informed about how strict my school's attendance policy was going to be.
If your dream is to be dean of Harvard one day, then yeah, it would be worth it to your career to go to a super expensive school that's "highly ranked" just for the connections. If you want to do primary care, not only are those schools a bad financial investment, but you'll probably get less rigorous training (FM docs aren't real doctors, etc etc). These connections can also help you get into competitive fields like derm, ortho, etc, but I still encourage you to think critically if you want these fields and are willing to be miserable in school to match those fields. Because once you've borrowed north of 400k, it becomes less of a question of "Do I want to do generic internal medicine" and more of a question of "Can I afford not to subspecialize?"
AOA doesn't amount to much. Matching is mostly your step 2 score and research. And your letters/3rd year evals. Class rank can help you, but it's just not that big of an issue, I wouldn't worry about it.
oh also if debt isn't a factor, yeah, just go to the highest ranked school where you'll be happiest. But I see people all the time telling people to borrow $600,000 to be a pediatrician, which is incredibly dumb.
1. What's the cost? you can go to a private school and pay $400,000, but if you do that, specialties like IM, peds, and FM aren't impossible, but it makes it harder to pay off that kind of debt. Also, you may be dead set on dermatology or something high paying like that, but in med school, everyone is at least as smart as you I promise. Don't go to a hyper expensive school banking on making derm money
2. Mandatory attendance is awful, and even if you like the team based learning format, it should be optional. Trust me on this. My classmates who were back in the classroom 3 days after delivering their first child were pissed that they weren't informed about how strict my school's attendance policy was going to be.
If your dream is to be dean of Harvard one day, then yeah, it would be worth it to your career to go to a super expensive school that's "highly ranked" just for the connections. If you want to do primary care, not only are those schools a bad financial investment, but you'll probably get less rigorous training (FM docs aren't real doctors, etc etc). These connections can also help you get into competitive fields like derm, ortho, etc, but I still encourage you to think critically if you want these fields and are willing to be miserable in school to match those fields. Because once you've borrowed north of 400k, it becomes less of a question of "Do I want to do generic internal medicine" and more of a question of "Can I afford not to subspecialize?"
AOA doesn't amount to much. Matching is mostly your step 2 score and research. And your letters/3rd year evals. Class rank can help you, but it's just not that big of an issue, I wouldn't worry about it.
oh also if debt isn't a factor, yeah, just go to the highest ranked school where you'll be happiest. But I see people all the time telling people to borrow $600,000 to be a pediatrician, which is incredibly dumb.
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