Wayne State vs. Boston University

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Wayne
Pros:
- Full-tuition scholarship
- Close to home

Cons:
- Unorganized
- Felt unimpressed at interview day

Boston
Pros:
- Amazing city
- Great place for healthcare and research
- Love their Social Justice mission
- Impressive match list
- So many opportunities

Cons:
- Super expensive
- Far from home

 

[almondflower]

Easily Wayne. The tuition alone for BU is $63k/year which adds up to $252k total and Boston is a pretty expensive city too on top of that.

 

[sice4]

There’s to be a lot of anti BU sentiment on SDN. I rarely see threads of a school vs BU where SDN votes/advises choosing BU. BU seems like a great program to me. Could anyone comment on why this seems to be the case on SDN?

 

[Ligament]

If you don't go to Wayne you are insane.

You have no idea what a burden $300k in medical school debt is. It is a future in servitude.

if you choose any medical school for "social justice" you are absolutely crazy. The fact you are event considering that a positive is concerning.

Wayne is a very good education. I was a resident at UMich and a fellow at Wayne. The Wayne state med students ran circles around the UMich med students when on rotation in my departments. Lots of pathology to see in Detroit. Fellow doctors that went to Wayne were always top notch, hard working, reliable. Detroit is a total s*ithole (native Michigander here) but a good place to learn medicine and to learn it for free is a blessing.

 

[deleted966008]

BU, while higher ranked, isn’t going to open up enough extra doors to justify that price tag.

Save the money and crush it at Wayne

 

[Ligament]

Unless it is harvard or stanford, go to the very cheapest med school you get into.

 

[MazKanata]

The biggest problems with BU are the culture and the price tag. They claim a “social justice” angle to certain electives, but they really haven’t defined what that means for them specifically and it is more of just a general selling point which many schools kind of toss in there. It isn’t like Harvard where students are actually supported in terms of getting to do global health projects or clinical rotations, in fact they kind of actively discourage this and tell students that you’ll get injured abroad and your family will freak out and they make a very big deal about clearing whatever your doing with the school even though you’ll have to pay for it all yourself.

Because of the high tuition or just old school hierarchy the mentality is that they kind of think students will go into practice after residency without a fellowship and find a job that will allow them to pay off the huge loans. It pays to go to the cheapest school possible if you want to actually do global health work in the future or serve an underserved community, BU is just too business like. Similarly as it is a business-type school, they don’t promote clinicians who want to contribute to research in their career. Pediatrics in specific is pretty weak there, the hospitals that many students rotate through are community hospitals which aren’t focused on teaching and hate to do it, it isn’t on the level of Harvard affiliated hospitals.

Boston Medical Center used to be Boston City Hospital, it has some history, but certainly not an exceptional claim to indigent care in Boston. You might rotate there as a student, or other even less academic community medical centers which might look down on the non-Harvard students rotating through. Bad (fake?) research came out of BCH which concluded that opioids aren't addictive based on superficial observations of hospitalized patients (and lack of explanation as to how the research was done), it was published as a letter in the New England Journal (bypassing peer review) and doctors went ahead decades ago with prescribing tons of opioids. Probably at some point BU could face a lawsuit, the infamous letter as since retracted, probably a first for the New England Journal. More recently BU has advocated over the past decade to loosen up regulation of e-cigarettes, with a burgeoning e-cigarette epidemic among children that they don't acknowledge only hoping to get their adult smokers a cessation tool.

There is a malignant teaching culture at BU, be prepared to be harassed in personal and inappropriate ways and your commitment to medicine mocked. It is what it is, an old school way of teaching through harassment. The administration faculty have been there forever, in some ways dislike students or having to interact with them, and are really perplexed that there are students who are focused on giving back such as through international work/teaching or research.

Be careful not to step on any toes or better yet, do not spend much time interacting with clinical faculty or student/academic affairs as they can make your life very difficult. If the school was high quality in terms of a focus on clinical excellence and research and real social justice work through attendings who cared to mentor, (or even just answer a couple questions about international health work), then it might be worth it, but lack of mentorship, malignant teaching culture and few resources for related activities such as global health work or research (which the school doesn’t support for medical students, but masters students get the red carpet rolled out for them), make it a less attractive school.

Of course students aren’t perfect, (though most attendings don’t like to teach at BU and are perplexed it is a teaching hospital and hate “spoon feeding” students), in the age of #metoo, a lot happens at BU that shouldn’t be permissible any longer.

 

[5yewy5r]

The biggest problems with BU are the culture and the price tag.

...

There is a malignant teaching culture at BU, be prepared to be harassed in personal and inappropriate ways and your commitment to medicine mocked. It is what it is, an old school way of teaching through harassment. The administration faculty have been there forever, in some ways dislike students or having to interact with them, and are really perplexed that there are students who are focused on giving back such as through international work/teaching or research.

Be careful not to step on any toes or better yet, do not spend much time interacting with clinical faculty or student/academic affairs as they can make your life very difficult. If the school was high quality in terms of a focus on clinical excellence and research and real social justice work through attendings who cared to mentor, (or even just answer a couple questions about international health work), then it might be worth it, but lack of mentorship, malignant teaching culture and few resources for related activities such as global health work or research (which the school doesn’t support for medical students, but masters students get the red carpet rolled out for them), make it a less attractive school.

Of course students aren’t perfect, (though most attendings don’t like to teach at BU and are perplexed it is a teaching hospital and hate “spoon feeding” students), in the age of #metoo, a lot happens at BU that shouldn’t be permissible any longer.

I have always heard mixed things about BU and got an "off" vibe there when I interviewed (read: purely gut feeling, and definitely not a "bad" vibe), but this is a pretty damning statement... Can anyone support/refute? What experience do you have with BU, MazKanata?

 

[ChymeofPassion]

I have always heard mixed things about BU and got an "off" vibe there when I interviewed (read: purely gut feeling, and definitely not a "bad" vibe), but this is a pretty damning statement... Can anyone support/refute? What experience do you have with BU, MazKanata?

I got an off-vibe from BU as an undergraduate, and if I ended up going go BU for medical school I would feel strange not carrying some kind of self defense to Boston Medical Center. It's called the Heroin Highway for a reason.

 

[CaptainWEMT]

As a Boston native and someone who shadowed at Boston Medical Center, my first instinct would be to choose BU. In this case, I would actually go with Wayne State. Any of the differences that you mentioned between the 2 schools are not worth the difference in cost. A full tuition scholarship at Wayne would leave you better able to pursue social justice after medical school than any social justice training that you might receive at BU.