Which school?? Helping You Help Yourself

[LizzyM]

Yikes. I was hoping this thread would give me a little better idea but I still find myself indecisive. I think it's because the schools I applied to were all fairly similar and were places I thought would be a good fit.

Maybe part of it is that I don't know exactly what I want? Besides a cooperative environment, a curriculum that is not exclusively PBL, and an urban/city location (I want to work with the urban underserved)... I'm not sure really what else even matters to me. I really think each school will give me a great education.

The one huge difference between the schools I've been accepted at though is one is in a warm climate, and I hate winter. But I feel like that's a silly reason to pick a school...

You'll be thanking yourself every time you look at a weather map between November and March. If the only variable that matters is climate (because there is no variation among the schools in your queue with regard to the other factors you consider important) then climate is a perfectly good reason to pick one school over the other.

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[MsJLewis]

What if you never just got that warm and fuzzy feeling inside when you've visited a school? I've gone on a lot of interviews but I never had that "this school is right/perfect fit" feeling. I don't know which one to choose because right now I look at them all and I'm like.. meh, they're all pretty equal. I know that this is a great problem to have but its like everyday my friends/family/co-workers keep asking, "Where are you going to go?!" and I just can't answer them.

 

[aaj117]

What if you never just got that warm and fuzzy feeling inside when you've visited a school? I've gone on a lot of interviews but I never had that "this school is right/perfect fit" feeling. I don't know which one to choose because right now I look at them all and I'm like.. meh, they're all pretty equal. I know that this is a great problem to have but its like everyday my friends/family/co-workers keep asking, "Where are you going to go?!" and I just can't answer them.

maybe you never got that feeling as a self-preservation mechanism. Because apparently every time i get that feeling, it leads to rejection, but everytime i just kinda like a school, i get in.

 

[Jolie South]

What if you never just got that warm and fuzzy feeling inside when you've visited a school? I've gone on a lot of interviews but I never had that "this school is right/perfect fit" feeling. I don't know which one to choose because right now I look at them all and I'm like.. meh, they're all pretty equal. I know that this is a great problem to have but its like everyday my friends/family/co-workers keep asking, "Where are you going to go?!" and I just can't answer them.

i'd try to go to second looks if your schools offer them. otherwise, i would pick based on money and location.

 

[notdeadyet]

i'd try to go to second looks if your schools offer them. otherwise, i would pick based on money and location.

^^^ good advice...

 

[MsJLewis]

maybe you never got that feeling as a self-preservation mechanism. Because apparently every time i get that feeling, it leads to rejection, but everytime i just kinda like a school, i get in.

I think I did a lot of that. I think I tried to not get too attached to the schools since you never know how admissions is gonna work.

i'd try to go to second looks if your schools offer them. otherwise, i would pick based on money and location.

Yea, I guess I will try to go to as many second looks that I can get away with (I took off a lot of days for interviews).

But if I went by money and location, it would still be a tie between 3 or more schools. It'll come down to the gut feelings I get at second looks.

 

[Monkey House]

The whole decision process feels like going to say a Toyota dealership to pick out a car. Basically all the Toyota cars are pretty much the same, a few have some nifty features, a few have a nifty price...but at the end of the day its still a car with 4 wheels. But the real kicker is that you don't even really know where you need this car to take you!! You have to pick one car, but you don't even know if you will need it say for city driving (emergency medicine perhaps), off-roading (rural medicine perhaps) etc..


I don't mean to demean medical school, I love it, but am just making a metaphor to how I feel about picking. And no, I don't own a car yet =D

 

[Drogba]

hmmm...I see. So then how do you engage in careful deliberation without considering the individual factors that are of the utmost importance to you?

You certainly should consider individual factors, and if taking notes helps organize the information from so many schools then certainly you should do that too. My contention was with that the quantification of these factors represents a highly arbitrary and restrictive methods of decisionmaking. To try and objectify an essentially subjective process seems strange to me. This is the same reason adcoms jobs seem so awkward, and why I suggested people relish (mmm hotdogs...) in the fact they need not please anyone with pretenses of objectivity.

I could honestly see myself (without having something tangible) going through the various likes and dislikes of each school without applying a uniform method for ensuring I do not favor one school over the other due to my own bias (based on some slightly ambiguous rankings meant to appeal to a mass of people, rather than be tailored according to my specific needs).

I think you ought to trust yourself more . Truly, there are few really huge factors that play into this decision that you don't need a list to keep track of and which are by their nature fairly objective (location, cost).

I'm probably going to get laughed at for this one (maybe not by you)...but I am humble enough to not allow my pride to prevent me from asking you this...but what do you mean by emergent property? (I am assuming that by "the attactiveness of a school is an emergent property" you mean that one's particular attraction to a school is still too new in the developmental phase to truly decipher what characteristics may be personally appealing or unappealing).

Emergent properties refer to properties that "emerge" in complex systems that cannot simply be explained by the properties of the systems constituents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_property, basically "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts"). I thought it was a rather fitting and precise description of what I was getting at

So I guess I should explain how I was fully planning on using the research I have done.

Due to financial limitations (and for the simple sake of keeping my sanity) I cannot apply to 60+ med schools. In order for me to dwindle down this list to a reasonable #, without making spontaneous decisions (while sitting in Starbucks sipping on hot tea), I had to come up with a method that would give me the best chance of applying to schools I felt would fit me best (based on provided public information...US News rankings not considered).

Considering the fact that I have quantified my reasons for applying to specific schools, I am not going to allow those preliminary scores to function as determinants of where I would attend, assuming I were to be interviewed and eventually accepted. What I do plan on doing is focusing my attention on the schools to which I have been granted and interview and then use the interview day and continuing correspondence to not only confirm/challenge what I initially found (i.e. to ensure my experience in person validates whatever score I originally assigned)....yeah...it is tedious...but at least in my case very necessary.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad strategy as you are using it to decide which schools to apply to, assuming you have little intimate knowledge of most of them. I just think when you are deciding between schools that have accepted you a points system is either: 1) poorly equipped to represent the complexity of the decision or 2) irrelevant because there are strong and obvious reasons for choosing one school over the other. Personally, though I've not yet applied, I have a very clear hierarchy of which schools I want to attend, especially for my top few choices.

By the way are you still in philly?

I just don't want this process to be too gray...I need as much black and white in my life as possible.

yeah...sooooo...ummmmm...yeah

Good luck .

 

[45408]

You might think it was gut but it was rational based on your values: close to family>prestige and lower cost.

If you had polled 100 people on the forum most would have told you to pick the other school.

Sorry, I wasn't real clear. Family > prestige was the rational portion of my decision. My gut feeling was that the other school wasn't my style, for no particularly well-defined reasons.

 

[45408]

You'll be thanking yourself every time you look at a weather map between November and March. If the only variable that matters is climate (because there is no variation among the schools in your queue with regard to the other factors you consider important) then climate is a perfectly good reason to pick one school over the other.

Especially if you've never lived in a cold climate. It gets BAD sometimes, and it can be a huge shock to someone from California. It doesn't really bother me, but I've got over 18" of snow in my backyard, and our sidewalk had two inches of ice on it for over a week. I think it's under 20 degrees right now outside. That's like standing in your freezer.

 

[silverlining1]

Especially if you've never lived in a cold climate. It gets BAD sometimes, and it can be a huge shock to someone from California. It doesn't really bother me, but I've got over 18" of snow in my backyard, and our sidewalk had two inches of ice on it for over a week. I think it's under 20 degrees right now outside. That's like standing in your freezer.

Unimaginable! Last month I went somewhere that was 20 degrees ABOVE zero with a centimeter of ice, and I thought it was ridiculous... There WAS a lot of snow, though.

Right now I've only got one option (and I'm very grateful for it), but I hope I'll be using LizzyM's pointers to make a decision in the future

 

[Jolie South]

Especially if you've never lived in a cold climate. It gets BAD sometimes, and it can be a huge shock to someone from California. It doesn't really bother me, but I've got over 18" of snow in my backyard, and our sidewalk had two inches of ice on it for over a week. I think it's under 20 degrees right now outside. That's like standing in your freezer.

I was totally dreading Philly for the cold, but since the Baylor acceptance, I'll gladly take the sauna.

 

[elfish]

ok, so what about when you're not really feeling any of the schools you've gotten into. as of right now i do have some choices, but the ones i really (thought) i liked i didn't get interviews at. i honestly don't know what to do -- of course i am blessed and happy to have so many acceptances (5 to be exact) but i honestly don't really *see myself* happy at any of them. i know i sound like a whiny little beyotch but i can't stand the thought of not being happy for the next few years...sigh.

 

[BoxingTheStars]

Especially if you've never lived in a cold climate. It gets BAD sometimes, and it can be a huge shock to someone from California. It doesn't really bother me, but I've got over 18" of snow in my backyard, and our sidewalk had two inches of ice on it for over a week. I think it's under 20 degrees right now outside. That's like standing in your freezer.

Sadly (or luckily?) I'm not from California, and I've lived in one of the northern states most of my life. So I know just how bad it is. Scraping the ice off your car, doors and locks freezing shut, having to drive 20 mph on the highway because of the snow and ice, having your face, fingers and toes numb by the time you walk from the parking lot to class... it sucks. Plus I don't know why but the sky is always gray and cloudy in the winter in addition to the crappy temperature, just to make things more depressing.

I also noticed, looking back at my transcripts, that my lower grades always came during winter quarter. Probably because I had a 20 min walk to class and some days I'd look outside and think, oh HELL no am I going out in that...

I figure: state school in warm location > state school in my state > private school in cold climate.... I think 1 year of OOS tuition is a fair price to pay for my warmth (and happiness)

 

[TopDocChick]

Sadly (or luckily?) I'm not from California, and I've lived in one of the northern states most of my life. So I know just how bad it is. Scraping the ice off your car, doors and locks freezing shut, having to drive 20 mph on the highway because of the snow and ice, having your face, fingers and toes numb by the time you walk from the parking lot to class... it sucks. Plus I don't know why but the sky is always gray and cloudy in the winter in addition to the crappy temperature, just to make things more depressing.

I also noticed, looking back at my transcripts, that my lower grades always came during winter quarter. Probably because I had a 20 min walk to class and some days I'd look outside and think, oh HELL no am I going out in that...

I figure: state school in warm location > state school in my state > private school in cold climate.... I think 1 year of OOS tuition is a fair price to pay for my warmth (and happiness)

I'd go for warmth. I didn't get accepted at any particularly warm places, but I am going to go to the warmest of the three. This winter has been insane.

 

[riceman04]

You certainly should consider individual factors, and if taking notes helps organize the information from so many schools then certainly you should do that too. My contention was with that the quantification of these factors represents a highly arbitrary and restrictive methods of decisionmaking. To try and objectify an essentially subjective process seems strange to me. This is the same reason adcoms jobs seem so awkward, and why I suggested people relish (mmm hotdogs...) in the fact they need not please anyone with pretenses of objectivity.



I think you ought to trust yourself more . Truly, there are few really huge factors that play into this decision that you don't need a list to keep track of and which are by their nature fairly objective (location, cost).



Emergent properties refer to properties that "emerge" in complex systems that cannot simply be explained by the properties of the systems constituents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_property, basically "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts"). I thought it was a rather fitting and precise description of what I was getting at



I don't think this is necessarily a bad strategy as you are using it to decide which schools to apply to, assuming you have little intimate knowledge of most of them. I just think when you are deciding between schools that have accepted you a points system is either: 1) poorly equipped to represent the complexity of the decision or 2) irrelevant because there are strong and obvious reasons for choosing one school over the other. Personally, though I've not yet applied, I have a very clear hierarchy of which schools I want to attend, especially for my top few choices.

By the way are you still in philly?



Good luck .

I guess you and I just have a very different perspective on this decision making process. Obviously you are absolutely satisfied with your method and I with mine.

Yup...still in Killadelphia...whoops Philadelphia!
Lions, tigers, and crackheads OH MY!

 

[Drogba]

I guess you and I just have a very different perspective on this decision making process. Obviously you are absolutely satisfied with your method and I with mine.

Yup...still in Killadelphia...whoops Philadelphia!
Lions, tigers, and crackheads OH MY!

That is whats most important .