Top Factors to Consider in Choosing a Medical School?

[RhinB]

Just going through and thinking about top factors when choosing a medical school, feel free to add:

• Tuition / Financial Aid
• Class Size
• Location
• Maturity of Class (including age, and other demographics)*(Edit)
  
• Quality of Education (high passing rate on boards, high specialty matching rate, etc.)
• Curriculum
• Friendly Staff and Students?

Anything else?

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[deleted480308]

I generally advise "offered you a seat" as the first metric

 

[Spinach Dip]

maturity of class

WTF does this mean?

 

[RhinB]

WTF does this mean?

I generally mean age of the class but I could expand to other demographics too.

 

[The Knife & Gun Club]

I feel like education quality is hard to parce out. Pretty much every us school has the same pass rate on their boards (>95% if I recall correctly), and speciality choices is tough to use as an indicator because it's much more a function of people's preferences.

One method I've heard of us look at the people going into internal medicine and see what programs they're going to.

Also look at location when you look at match lists. Do they send many people to your desired region? Does almost everyone stay nearby for residency?

^thats what I've been most concerned with lately...is it a bad idea to go to a school that almost never matches students into my preferred region?

 

[pageantry]

I've really appreciated the schools that seem the best organized in terms of helping the students through the interview/matriculation process. Friendliness is one thing. But, to me, actually making my life simpler now translates into kindness, respect, and accountability down the line.

Case in point: I visited one school where every student I spoke with begged me to go somewhere else if I had the chance, because the administration was so screwed up that it made their lives relentlessly harder. They said things like unanswered correspondence pre-matriculation should be taken seriously, because once you're IN the school they have no reason to improve their behavior, and in that school's case it turned into things like: canceled scheduled days off, large changes to the syllabi, no certainty of recourse when dealing with personal emergencies or complaints, etc.

On the other hand, regarding one of your criteria, I have seen maturity and immaturity at every school I visited. That item was higher on my list before I started re-visits.

You'll also see a lot of people on here talk about the importance of the clinical years in choosing a school. What is the culture like? Where are the rotations and how much commuting are you expected to do? Do you need to move? Are students super involved or mostly expected to keep out of the way?

I've also been told to look out for how much dedicated STEP time you get, and whether you have lots of open time in 4th year to go on interviews and arrange away rotations.


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[pageantry]

Also look at location when you look at match lists. Do they send many people to your desired region? Does almost everyone stay nearby for residency?

^thats what I've been most concerned with lately...is it a bad idea to go to a school that almost never matches students into my preferred region?

I sort of asked this question in another thread. @Med Ed did a lovely job of illustrating that less competitive residencies in desirable locations (in that case, looking at FM at UCSD) can and are filled by a whole range of students from all over, including DO schools.

Sometimes when you look at schools' match lists and see regional bias, it's because the people who go to school there want to stay close to home.


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[Law2Doc]

I generally mean age of the class but I could expand to other demographics too.

And this impacts you why? (either you are older or you hate old people -- can't tell from your post ). An argument can be made that the best schools will strive to be more diverse - to accept the best people from all demographics. If you are older than your peers you add to the diversity. If there are a ton of older faces it's actually probably not as diverse. So ideally there's an ideal mix but your presence can create/impact that mix. Pretty much every med school has at least one career changer over 30 these days, most have more than one, so a focus on a "nontrad friendly" environment is kind of silly IMHO. If the school takes you, it's nontrad friendly. I would probably take this off your list because the best school for you is likely independent of this factor.

Important things are:
- location
- cost/loans
- schedule/attendance- (full or half days, can you watch lectures remotely or is attendance mandatory?)
- research opportunities (if that interests you)
- affiliated hospital with rotations/ electives in everything you might be interested in
- curriculum
- timing/study time for steps
- grading/ranking systems
- whether the library seems conducive to studying
- cafeteria options/local eateries
- housing options

 

[pocillopora]

I believe the collective SDN wisdom I picked up on time and time again was "pick whatever is cheapest."
That is the #1 most important aspect. Other than that, all of the other factors have been outlined above.

 

[RhinB]

Thanks for all the great answers! Lots to think about.

 

[piii]

I feel like education quality is hard to parce out. Pretty much every us school has the same pass rate on their boards (>95% if I recall correctly), and speciality choices is tough to use as an indicator because it's much more a function of people's preferences.

One method I've heard of us look at the people going into internal medicine and see what programs they're going to.

Also look at location when you look at match lists. Do they send many people to your desired region? Does almost everyone stay nearby for residency?

^thats what I've been most concerned with lately...is it a bad idea to go to a school that almost never matches students into my preferred region?

But even all of those are function of preference. Like do all the students prefer that region any way? There's no way of knowing how each program was ranked on each students match list. That'd be the only way to tell.

 

[Law2Doc]

But even all of those are function of preference. Like do all the students prefer that region any way? There's no way of knowing how each program was ranked on each students match list. That'd be the only way to tell.

Yeah there's no way to read a match list this way. It's all based on most likely wrong assumptions of why total strangers are making certain life decisions. Don't base your own life decisions on this.