sluox said:
just while you are still here and i'm stressing over the boards...Dr. Andy M. (and others) Could you give us some pointers regarding:
How high does your USLME need to be (as an MSTP graduate) in order to get in, say, Mass General's Pathology program. 225? 230? 250?
there's a colleague of mine who graduated with a 1st author Science article and multiple review articles and JCB articles. He got turned down by Harvard and Hopkin's pediatrics. Is this beacuse he has a bad board score??
220+ seems to be fine for pathology. However, my buddy at Mass Gen told me that Pathology residency program seemed to interview lots and lots of people with 250+ during the most recent application season.
I wouldn't fret though. Mass General goes pretty far down their rank list to fill its program. And I don't think their program filled with all 250+ scoring folks this year. Mass General has a reputation of being a malignant factory where residents are overworked so many people don't rank their program #1, despite the program's prestige. As for that negative reputation part, I didn't get that impression so much when I interviewed there and I ranked them #2 (in fact I got the impression that the workload burden placed on the shoulders of the residents will decrease due to the hiring of more PAs). Mass General has lots of prestige and is considered one of the best or THE BEST program for training diagnostically-oriented pathologist (as opposed to basic science research oriented pathologists). I dunno...Hopkins and MGH can fight for that distinction
But anyways, many people will easily rank MGH #2 or #3. But they end up getting their #1 choice so MGH won't get these people.
As for your friend, there could have been lots of possible reasons why he got turned down. And what do you mean by turned down? Did he not get an interview or was he not ranked to match at their programs? If he got an interview at Hopkins and Harvard, ranked them #1 and #2, and did not match at either place...I would take that as a rejection, yes. Why he got rejected could be that his interviewing skillz don't even measure up to the interviewing skillz of an orangutan in heat. I dunno. Maybe his letters of recommendations were not good. It could've been his USMLE step 1 scores. Who knows...
MSTPs tend to do pretty well on step 1, although that is not a hard and fast rule. Furthermore, if a person doesn't score high on step 1, it doesn't mean that the person is stupid. Step 1 is no longer standardized since the exam started being administrated via computer back in 1999. So who knows what a good step 1 score means these days
? Anyways, many people walk out of step 1 feeling like crap. Then their eyes light up when they get the score report. That was my experience, pretty much. So don't fret. Do your best and you probably will feel like crap after finishing this marathon exam. But I highly recommend that you go out to the bar and down a few with your friends and go balls out celebrating after taking step 1.
