how much does the prestige of your med. school help

[Chankovsky]

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in helping you get a competitive residency

 

[Fantasy Sports]

1. Step I
2. Clinical Grades
3. Letters of Rec
4. Research
5. Med school rep

Also, #3 might cancel out #5. For example, a medical school may be lowly ranked, but it might have a stellar department that you want to go into for residency with some bigwigs. If those bigwigs write you an incredible letter, it will probably cancel out #5 and then some.

I enjoy how people try to make it sound as if med school rep has nothing to do with residency applications. Obviously it does. And while we can debate the extent to which it does with personal anecdote, the overall trend is that good medical schools have students that match to good residencies (of course, there is the whole self-selection factor, but lets face it, going to Harvard helps in many ways.

 

[doc05]

med school rep is huge. don't let anyone tell you differently.

 

[Gut Shot]

med school rep is huge. don't let anyone tell you differently.

If you are at Harvard or Hopkins than rep will help you tremendously. If you are at the Prague School of Carribbean Medicality and Dentistritude then rep will hurt you.

If you are anywhere in between than you should just work hard and forget about it.

 

[Fantasy Sports]

If you are anywhere in between than you should just work hard and forget about it.

Well you should forget about it regardless, but I just wanted to point out that med school rep has a huge regional factor, regardless of whether you go to Harvard or not.

So UAB might not guarantee you a Mass Gen residency, but it is definitely well-respected in the south. Michigan might not guarantee you a residency in california, but it is well-respected in the midwest. And so on.

 

[b&ierstiefel]

Well you should forget about it regardless, but I just wanted to point out that med school rep has a huge regional factor, regardless of whether you go to Harvard or not.

So UAB might not guarantee you a Mass Gen residency, but it is definitely well-respected in the south. Michigan might not guarantee you a residency in california, but it is well-respected in the midwest. And so on.

agreed

 

[timebomb]

med school reputation definitely matters, but its weight is dependent on the program directors. some PDs put more stock in school name than others do. what also factors in is a particular program's experience with a particular school (for example, if a program has recently taken 2 residents from a school and both have performed poorly, the program might be hesitant to take another from that school).

 

[Gut Shot]

So UAB might not guarantee you a Mass Gen residency, but it is definitely well-respected in the south. Michigan might not guarantee you a residency in california, but it is well-respected in the midwest. And so on.

Agreed. My point was that the reputation of very few places (such as Harvard) will open doors you everywhere. Going anywhere else might open some doors and close others, but it's difficult to gauge where and when. Thus, if one has significant geographic preference, it might ultimately pay to attend medical school in that chosen region, but who knows?

Also, geographic proximity can be a double edged sword. Some programs might want to recruit from well outside their geographic regions because it demonstrates their ability to draw students from afar. Hence, MGH might prefer someone from Wash U or UCLA over someone from BU or Tufts. Again, who knows?

 

[bof]

much more than you think.

Going to the top school in your region will definately help during residency interviews (eg: harvard, ucsf, etc). People in your region will regard you as an excellent candidate even if you finish in the later half of you class and people outside your region will want to recruit you to their program.

boF

 

[Fantasy Sports]

Also, geographic proximity can be a double edged sword. Some programs might want to recruit from well outside their geographic regions because it demonstrates their ability to draw students from afar. Hence, MGH might prefer someone from Wash U or UCLA over someone from BU or Tufts. Again, who knows?

I don't think geographic proximity is a double-edged sword at all. I think we have to define geographic though-- I mean it in a strictly regional sense (West coast, Mountains, Great Lakes, Southwest, Northeast, Atlantic, etc). I think MGH would be perfectly content to have 3/4 of its class come from the northeast (and though I dont have a set of their recent class lists, I would a good proportion of their students come from the NE)

Geographic proximity is a pretty big factor I think, because it indicates you are willing to live in that area, which tells PDs that if they rank you highly, you have a good chance of coming. And there are a lot of regional ties between schools as well that boost that interaction.

 

[Gut Shot]

Geographic proximity is a pretty big factor I think, because it indicates you are willing to live in that area, which tells PDs that if they rank you highly, you have a good chance of coming. And there are a lot of regional ties between schools as well that boost that interaction.

Hey, I'm not discounting either reputation or geographic proximity as factors that may influence one's success in getting a residency, because they obviously can. I'm just saying that if you have no predetermined geographic preference then nitpicking over whether school A has a slightly better reputation than school B is a waste of time.

 

[kas23]

There is only one fact that I learned from these posts: students going to private schools say that your school matters (usually justifying their heavy loan burden) and students who go to state schools say it doesn't matter.

 

[Gut Shot]

I think MGH would be perfectly content to have 3/4 of its class come from the northeast (and though I dont have a set of their recent class lists, I would a good proportion of their students come from the NE)

Their website lists 60 programs drawn from over the past four years, and I count 6 from New England Proper, 7 more if you count NYC/Long Island, and 11 foreign medical school represented. I would be curious to know how this broke down in terms of numbers of residents from each school, and how it compared to the demographics of their applicant pool. But, since that ain't gonna happen...

 

[yaah]

There is only one fact that I learned from these posts: students going to private schools say that your school matters (usually justifying their heavy loan burden) and students who go to state schools say it doesn't matter.

👍 👍

People fail to see that the most important factor is the student, not the school.

 

[Gut Shot]

As I was lying awake last night (still recovering from a month in the Pacific Time Zone), I came across the idea that one could actually make some quantitative measure of how much reputation affects one's competitiveness. The problem is that it would require multiple years worth of data that only ERAS, the SF Match, the NRMP and the programs themselves would possess.

Alas, since that will never happen, we should all just stick to cocktails and conjecture instead.

 

[yaah]

As I was lying awake last night (still recovering from a month in the Pacific Time Zone), I came across the idea that one could actually make some quantitative measure of how much reputation affects one's competitiveness. The problem is that it would require multiple years worth of data that only ERAS, the SF Match, the NRMP and the programs themselves would possess.

Alas, since that will never happen, we should all just stick to cocktails and conjecture instead.

It would be an interesting study, however the # of confounding variables I think is probably too great to control for. There are so many factors that impact residency choice. However the fact remains that going to a certain medical school is not going to get you anywhere without the requisite work and effort.

 

[paroquet]

It would be an interesting study, however the # of confounding variables I think is probably too great to control for. There are so many factors that impact residency choice. However the fact remains that going to a certain medical school is not going to get you anywhere without the requisite work and effort.

It's possible to do this using modern machine learning methods. It would be no problem at all, actually, if these organizations released their accumulated data to artificial intelligence experts.

You could input salient variables such as your scores and grades, maybe your ethnicity, etc., and the computer program would give you your approximate chances for getting into the program.

In fact, they use this approach (with analogous data) to build biomedical informatics systems. (E.g., if someone weighs X lbs and is Y feet tall and has red hair, what's the probability that she will miscarry her child?) It's already a solved problem.

 

[yaah]

It's possible to do this using modern machine learning methods. It would be no problem at all, actually, if these organizations released their accumulated data to artificial intelligence experts.

You could input salient variables such as your scores and grades, maybe your ethnicity, etc., and the computer program would give you your approximate chances for getting into the program.

In fact, they use this approach (with analogous data) to build biomedical informatics systems. (E.g., if someone weighs X lbs and is Y feet tall and has red hair, what's the probability that she will miscarry her child?) It's already a solved problem.

"If these organizations released their accumulated data" is a HUGE if!

And I mean confounding variables like not all med schools have classes made up of people with similar scores, backgrounds, motivations, etc. I don't think it's as simple as plugging in numbers and locations.