MD & DO How much does T20 med schools *actually* matter for competitive specialties?

[tradkeke]

Hoping now that we are post-match, I was hoping those who matched or witnessed others match for competitive specialties such as ENT, neurosurg, derm, ortho, plastics, ophtho, about how much or how little med school prestige actually helped.

Is it like UG prestige for med school? Where it seems to weigh in slightly, but wouldn't necessarily save someones app. Or is it a scenario where you could say "yeah that guy would not have matched X if he didn't go to T20"? I've heard very differing reports even from current med students and was wanting to get some opinions here for the current match climate.

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[Bonejorno]

Somewhere in between. There is no absolute number or equivalent that anybody can give you. Name matters. What also matters is the people you get your letters from at those institutions, research opportunities available, and personal connections your mentors will have.

You’re not gonna match into derm with a step 1 of 198 even if you’re from Harvard just because of the school name. But most things equal, would a student from Harvard have an edge over a person from East Tennessee? Maybe. Probably.

 

[aldol16]

School name and abundance of opportunity are impossible to separate. One or both of those matter. If you go to a school with a strong X department and have strong letters from faculty well known in X specialty, you're going to be more competitive. While school name does not necessarily correlate with strength of their department in X specialty, it's a rough measure (i.e. Harvard isn't going to be horrible for anything). Where you go also determines how much assistance you have in the whole process. If you're a school that regularly sends 20 people into X specialty each year, you're going to be much better at doing that than a school that only has one student go into X specialty every other year. Top schools tend to send students into competitive specialties at top programs all the time. So the experience is there. As a prospective resident, you're basically a product. If you were buying the product, would you want to buy a product that comes from a brand with a known reputation and that you're very familiar with or would you rather buy a product from a brand with which you have much less experience?

 

[nimbus]

Hoping now that we are post-match, I was hoping those who matched or witnessed others match for competitive specialties such as ENT, neurosurg, derm, ortho, plastics, ophtho, about how much or how little med school prestige actually helped.

Is it like UG prestige for med school? Where it seems to weigh in slightly, but wouldn't necessarily save someones app. Or is it a scenario where you could say "yeah that guy would not have matched X if he didn't go to T20"? I've heard very differing reports even from current med students and was wanting to get some opinions here for the current match climate.

You can turn that statement around and say “that guy wouldn’t be attending a T20 if he wasn’t an outstanding student who has his s*** together.” It’s impossible to separate student quality from school ranking. If you look at the Columbia or Stanford match lists, 90% of their classes match programs that would require AOA/top scores/research from most other schools. Even their IM matches are at extremely competitive programs. In reality, T20 schools have solidly above average but not crazy high average board scores.

I would add that even within the T20, for people in the bottom of their respective classes, there seems to be a significant match advantage for T5 over T20.

 

[Espadaleader]

Departments matter a lot. Especially in small fields. If you go to a top 20 school, all of your faculty knows each other/went to school/residency/fellowship with each other. Their letter carries more weight and they are also doing more research on average to include you in. This is versus some schools that don’t even have Departments for that specialty where they have to rotate off site. It’s virtually impossible to overcome that.

 

[afib123]

Well pretty much as stated here. Research is probably the biggest factor in top universities. I imagine those guys are more productive and can churn out stuff very fast.
But if you go to a university like mine, you will have to work in general much harder to get research because there is not much time for academia.

 

[DokterMom]

Impressing on an away rotation or sub-i and solid STEP scores can easily outweigh an 'only-a-mid-tier' school.

As @aldol16 notes, residency programs are essentially buying a product -- or I'd say, a partially-made product. A well-known 'brand' (top tier med school) offers a somewhat more reliable assurance of quality than a mid- or lower-tier school, but it's certainly not the most important factor.

 

[WedgeDawg]

Depends on the home department, the school, and the specialty. A school with an incredibly well-known and respected home department will be like magic for matching a surgical subspecialty. These tend to correlate with top schools (but not always - for example, see Ortho at Iowa, Ophtho at Jefferson/Wills, etc).

For IM, it's also incredibly advantageous - like ridiculously so (if you don't believe me, go to the WAMC thread in the IM/IM Subspecialty resident forums and see how much weight people give to med school tier - spoiler, it's a LOT). Also take a look at the match lists for top schools - like 80-90% of students go to top IM programs.

That being said, you can totally match highly competitive specialties or highly competitive programs within specialties from not top schools, it's just a lot harder - you need AOA, lots of research, a bomb step score, strong away letters (if your specialty requires aways), etc. You can't have any deficiencies or mediocrities in your app, whereas coming from either a top school or a place with a top home program, you don't have to necessarily be the best of the best, you just have to be good.

From personal experience, I had a good but not stellar application for my specialty, and I'm convinced that many of the interviews I got were through people knowing my home department faculty very well and the fact that they vouched for me rather than because I had an impressive application on paper (my application was very average otherwise).

 

[tradkeke]

Thank you everyone for the responses!

Depends on the home department, the school, and the specialty. A school with an incredibly well-known and respected home department will be like magic for matching a surgical subspecialty. These tend to correlate with top schools (but not always - for example, see Ortho at Iowa, Ophtho at Jefferson/Wills, etc).

For IM, it's also incredibly advantageous - like ridiculously so (if you don't believe me, go to the WAMC thread in the IM/IM Subspecialty resident forums and see how much weight people give to med school tier - spoiler, it's a LOT). Also take a look at the match lists for top schools - like 80-90% of students go to top IM programs.

That being said, you can totally match highly competitive specialties or highly competitive programs within specialties from not top schools, it's just a lot harder - you need AOA, lots of research, a bomb step score, strong away letters (if your specialty requires aways), etc. You can't have any deficiencies or mediocrities in your app, whereas coming from either a top school or a place with a top home program, you don't have to necessarily be the best of the best, you just have to be good.

From personal experience, I had a good but not stellar application for my specialty, and I'm convinced that many of the interviews I got were through people knowing my home department faculty very well and the fact that they vouched for me rather than because I had an impressive application on paper (my application was very average otherwise).

How would I be able to tell if my home program is strong in something? I don't have access to Doximity, but heard it wasn't very accurate anyways. How does one find a decent list of residencies by competitiveness/prestige?

 

[WedgeDawg]

Thank you everyone for the responses!



How would I be able to tell if my home program is strong in something? I don't have access to Doximity, but heard it wasn't very accurate anyways. How does one find a decent list of residencies by competitiveness/prestige?

Mostly word of mouth - ask people who are applying into that specialty or just matched. You can PM me if you want my opinion which probably is meaningless if it's a specialty I'm not familiar with, but I might be able to point you towards a user who is in the know.

And doximity is okay for a lot of specialties in terms of broad strokes, but you shouldn't take, say, #9 vs. #14 on Doximity to mean that #9 is DEFINITELY a far superior residency program to #14. There's a lot of gray area involved, and people are often looking for different things in their residency programs, so everything is more or less subjective with some order hidden amongst the chaos.