Selectivity vs Placement

RFU/CMS has some nice matches.

 

Rosalind Franklin/Chicago Med

 

the rads chairman at NYMC apparently knows everyone in the radiology world and anyone who goes there and wants rads, gets it (paraphrasing what my tour guide told me)...

that being said, ny med has some great hospitals... awesome opportunities for 3rd and 4th years.

imo, nymc beats rfu/cms to a bloody pulp. no contest.

but maybe thats just me.

 

i don't think its a one-man show... the whole department is really strong. he's apparently some sort of superstar (from what the students said).

i'll repeat again, imo, nymed and rfu are in two seperate leagues (i've interviewed at both). rfu has no major affiliated hospitals (nothing reputable, anyways), nymc has westchester plus a boatload in the city. they are both outside their respective cities, but nymed is a 20 minute train ride into manhattan, whereas rfu is like an hour or more.

 

Actually NYMC is no longer really that easy to get into. It's not because it's a terribly good school comparatively, it's just that so many people apply to it as their safety school. When they rejected me last year they told me in the letter they got something like 8,000+ applicants last year. Crazy!

 

unfortunately, in this game, theres no such creature.

 

Agreed. I said they applied it as their safety school, I didn't say it works out that way.

 

Match lists are a tricky thing, and perhaps not something one should overly focus on as an applicant. At any rate, I'm not sure you can evaluate a match list by one specialty. If they put a lot of folks into radiology, but almost none into the other more competitive specialties, that might not be that good. Also bear in mind that the location makes a difference in match lists, so getting matched in radiology at a hospital in, eg. the rural SW, might not be as competitive as matching into radiology in NY, Boston, SF, etc. The hospital makes a big difference too, with some residencies in certain fields better than others even within the same given city. Also bear in mind that there are only 125 or so allo med schools, so all are going to have "some" placement into competitive specialties. And you often see quite competitve candidates deciding to do less prestigious residencies than they might otherwise obtain, to be closer to family, spouses, or perhaps they just like IM better than radiology. Thus I think looking at a match list, while interesting, is extremely hard for med school applicants to use as a particularly helpful tool. I think that's why things like US News, with all its flaws, and the MSAR will and should always be the primary evaluation tools of the med school applicant.

 

I would tend to agree with Law2Doc. It seems like it would be more pertinent to know how many students are making it into a top residency IN THEIR SPECIALTY OF CHOICE. But of course, "top" residencies in a field are hard to define. I think a good indicator might be percentage of graduates that match into their top choice, but this has limited usefulness because less competitive students will likely have less competitive residencies as their top choice. Also, at all schools, even those at the very top, place a high percentage of graduates into primary care fields. So there isn't any exact correlation between the quality/achievement/competitiveness of a med school graduate and placement into the most "competitive" specialties.

 

i heard that nymc was insanely competitive because for some reason it seemed that everyone who went there was gunning for a competitive field
so it might actually be a bad thing to see 19 matching in ortho (georgetown, i think) or 26 in radiology...i.e. just because a top top school matches say 6 in ortho, does that make it worse if you want to go into that field? i don't think so...it indicates that there's a healthy distribution of people interested in fields across the whole spectrum

 

Perhaps. But even within specialties there are places that are "better" than others, and those don't always track the US News rankings. And in a given year its certainly conceivable that a big chunk of the brightest people will want other specialties (eg. Optho) -- that does not mean they couldn't get into the one that you are interested in (Radiol). i.e. just because school X has more people going into radiology in a given year than Harvard doesn't mean that the people in Harvard couldn't get into radiology.

 

Again, I am not sure that just looking at the specialties actually captures the quality of a match list, though. A competitive specialty in a noncompetitive location may not always be better than a moderate specialty in a competitive location. A less competitive field at a place like Mass General or UCSF might be more coveted.

 

you heard that it was competitive to get into? or competive once you're a student there?

 

competitive/cut-throat once you get there, but less competitive to get in

my point was that just because nymc matches more in radiology than <insert harvard or penn or whatever> does, you can't say it's a better school if you want to do radiology
it's worse because it's so cut-throat and it lacks a balanced student body

 

I would rather go with a balanced school that fits my individual style cos in the 2ndish and 3rd year lots of students change their minds about specialty, u don't want to screw urself!

 

I went to nymc. It's hardly cut throat. I have no idea what you're talking about saying it's cut throat. There are gunners, there are gunners at every school, but by no means is it cut throat.

The Rads chair, btw, is a female, and she's young and she won't be retiring anytime soon. She's a fabulous teacher and just about everyone takes her elective if they don't go into rads. We've historically placed lots of people into rads. My class was the record with 26, but the year before was in the 20s as well, I believe. It becomes a running joke on the interview trail, from what I've heard. One of my co-intern's fiance is going into rads and I mentioned to him that I had a bunch of classmates that went into rads and he replied, "where'd you go to school, nymc?"