Would it be fair to say that the quality of your MD/PhD experience and program would be roughly equal to the number of students in said program (starting from 7-10+ students, but especially for monoliths like Weill-Cornell, Penn, and WashU), with some variation in quality dependent on program leaders' and schools' own attitudes for those with fewer MD/PhD students (between 4-7 students), and that variation increasing wildly for smaller programs up to a certain point (say <4 students)?
MD/PhD Quality and Number of Students
- Thread starter renrenxi
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Are you asking if smaller MD/PhD programs are worse than larger MD/PhD programs?
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Not necessarily, but institutional knowledge, support resources, and community are definitely valuable things. But I don’t think it necessarily means bigger program better for everyone
D
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I think the size is somewhat of an indicator as to how much the institution is willing to support the MD-PhD program; the large programs you mention don't run entirely on T32 grants and the school has to make an investment to keep them at those sizes.
My understanding is that there are definitely pros and cons of being in a large program like Lucca mentioned. Pros include being in a larger community, having more resources, having greater representation in the MD class (15-20% for Penn/WashU); cons include less individualized attention, having to compete for research mentors if you're interested in a popular field, etc. It seems like an entirely personal preference to me.
EDIT: My statement about T32 grants is misleading; please see Fencer's reply below.
My understanding is that there are definitely pros and cons of being in a large program like Lucca mentioned. Pros include being in a larger community, having more resources, having greater representation in the MD class (15-20% for Penn/WashU); cons include less individualized attention, having to compete for research mentors if you're interested in a popular field, etc. It seems like an entirely personal preference to me.
EDIT: My statement about T32 grants is misleading; please see Fencer's reply below.
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Absolutely no MD/PhD program runs "entirely on T32 grants". In fact, the MSTP T32 only supports 20-30% of the slots with an aim for 25%. A critical size of a cohort of your peer class is at least 4-7 students. The attention of the MSTP leadership (including PD) also needs to be divided between all of the students, thus, the mega programs might not have as much PD attention per student. Nevertheless, the size of the entire research enterprise is what correlates best with the size of the MD/PhD program. However, there are areas of excellence for some programs regardless of size. Those are areas of opportunity.
