I am quite amused that you all think I'm still some pre-med!! Jeez, I went through that all 4 years ago, why would I want to relive that mentality again?!?
No, I am not on any wait-lists. I am truly a 4th year med student and I have already matched into a residency last week. I have absolutely no agenda here other than to expose things that some people might not be aware of. Believe it or not, the information you have at your disposal when you are an almost MD like myself is vastly different than you have as a pre-med, regardless of how well plugged-in you think you are.
Basically, I'm trying to tell you that as a pre-med you essentially don't know anything regarding medicine, med school politics and certainly not med school finances. You swallow what you're fed by the med school admissions office. I would assume that bright young future doctors would never take only one side of the story as the truth. That's part of the reason why I posted here asking if anyone else had heard what I heard.
And incidentally, if you think that the health of a medical center has no effect on the health of its med school, you are GROSSLY mistaken. The two are intrinsically linked. All of those departments of Surgery and Medicine, for example, at Mount Sinai hospital are academic departments in the school of medicine. Professors in the classroom and on the wards are members of these academic departments. To say that the med school and the hospital are separate entities is a fallacy.
In addition, to say that the quality of a residency has nothing to do with the med school of the hospital, I can tell you for a fact that if a hospital has no med school associated with it, it automatically becomes less desireable to train at. That's because the hospital is no longer considered an "Academic Medical Center". Try this exercise for yourself: name a great hospital that is NOT associated with a med school. I'll start you off: Mass General? no, Upenn? no. Hopkins? no. UCSF? no. Mayo? no. I think you get the picture. Residencies at non-academic medical centers are filled with foregin grads and bottom of the barrel US grads. It's a fact.
Once again, my point is not to scare people unintentionally. My point is to get people to ask questions and figure things out for themselves. That, in essence is what med school is about. When you get onto the wards, you won't be fed information, you'll have to ask questions to figure things out. Get some practice doing that now...it will pay off down the line.
