Which school?

[Doctorstudent555]

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hi all! I recently posted "which schools" should I apply to but it was mostly based on my stats.

So now I'm going to say what I am interested in for a medical school and please let me know if you care to offer school suggestions!

I'm really interested in developing that and doing global health activities. I really enjoying traveling and learning new languages and about other cultures. I would love to do Doctors Without Borders one day. I like living in a city. I'd like to do clinical research but I wouldn't say it's my top passion. Having good research mentors is really important to me though. I Pass fail would be nice but I suppose I'm not opposed to a traditional grading system. I'm a pretty competitive person but with all the stress of medical school I'm not sure if cut throat competition would be an ideal environment for me. I think I am interested in surgery, but I am trying to keep my options option and going to a school that matches well into even the competitive specialties would obviously be great.

Can anyone offer suggestions? Anyone attending a school and have similar interests?

 

[hubbsbubbs]

Are you interested in schools that are surrounded by spanish speaking populations? Miami and San Diego both come to mind. They also have strong research opportunities.


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[Doctorstudent555]

Are you interested in schools that are surrounded by spanish speaking populations? Miami and San Diego both come to mind. They also have strong research opportunities.


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I did apply to Miami! What's San Diego like? (The school). I like the city other than the expense of living.

 

[efle]

Looks like you're a LizzyM ~80, if I were you I'd apply to your state programs and half or more of the top ~20 schools. Research mentorship and resources, ability to match to competitive residencies, and public health/global health options are generally strongest at these same places that people have pointed you towards because of your numbers. As an example take Hopkins which might fit on your dream list- their associated public health institute (Bloomberg) is among the very best, they hand out a dozen full scholarships to their med students to get a public health master's in the middle of their MD, and many people do rotations abroad in the clinical years.

Oh and also, pretty sure all of the top 20 (except Penn) is fully pass/fail in the preclinical years now, and they all tend to have high percentage of non-trads. Most are also in major cities.

 

[COMED2468]

Are you interested in schools that are surrounded by spanish speaking populations? Miami and San Diego both come to mind. They also have strong research opportunities.
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Full disclosure because I'm an incoming M1 there, but the Arizona campus of Mayo sounds like it could be a good fit.

Baylor might also be a good fit. They have different tracks you can take -- global health, care of the underserved, and research being three that come to mind in regards to your interests. --> https://media.bcm.edu/documents/2016/fa/the-baylor-experience-2016.pdf

 

[Goro]

How about the three Puerto Rican schools?

 

[PreMedMissteps]

What is your home state?

 

[Doctorstudent555]

Wow thanks guys! This is helpful. I'm from georgia. Do you think it'd be helpful to write about my engineering internships for "tell me anything more" secondaries? I'm looking at Baylor specifically here. I don't want to come off as unfocused on medicine. I related the skills back to medicine but still.

 

[Doctorstudent555]

Looks like you're a LizzyM ~80, if I were you I'd apply to your state programs and half or more of the top ~20 schools. Research mentorship and resources, ability to match to competitive residencies, and public health/global health options are generally strongest at these same places that people have pointed you towards because of your numbers. As an example take Hopkins which might fit on your dream list- their associated public health institute (Bloomberg) is among the very best, they hand out a dozen full scholarships to their med students to get a public health master's in the middle of their MD, and many people do rotations abroad in the clinical years.

Oh and also, pretty sure all of the top 20 (except Penn) is fully pass/fail in the preclinical years now, and they all tend to have high percentage of non-trads. Most are also in major cities.

Thank you! Would you suggest researching here on SDN? I don't think any official websites will say anything about poor mentorship

 

[COMED2468]

Thanks! Baylor is up there- do you think my engineering would hurt or help there? I will check out Mayo Arizona!

Not sure. I know that their website boasts about having a wide variety of undergraduate majors in each class.

 

[efle]

Thank you! Would you suggest researching here on SDN? I don't think any official websites will say anything about poor mentorship

Something you might look for on the websites is a mandatory scholarly project being part of the curriculum. For example see Northwestern and Hopkins pages. Some of the research powerhouses don't have any mandatory project, but nearly everyone does research anyways, which conveys a similar message - example would be WashU where there is no required project but 95% of people get involved in research anyways. You can also pull up a school MSAR page and search for "research/lab", if the number is near 100%, then they obviously emphasize building a class of future academics. Example here would be Vandy, where 99% of admits last cycle had research/lab on their application.

Tbh it pretty accurately lines up with US News Research ranks though, hence why those get thrown around as shorthand a lot. If it is very highly ranked there, it's going to be a research powerhouse, have tons of resources and boast an impressive match list. The way to approach it is like I said before - apply to a whole bunch that you might have an interest in, and then after interviews and seeing where you get in, that's when to start worrying about the small differences between similar places, like whether you prefer one city to another or liked one type of curriculum better.

 

[Doctorstudent555]

Something you might look for on the websites is a mandatory scholarly project being part of the curriculum. For example see Northwestern and Hopkins pages. Some of the research powerhouses don't have any mandatory project, but nearly everyone does research anyways, which conveys a similar message - example would be WashU where there is no required project but 95% of people get involved in research anyways. You can also pull up a school MSAR page and search for "research/lab", if the number is near 100%, then they obviously emphasize building a class of future academics. Example here would be Vandy, where 99% of admits last cycle had research/lab on their application.

Tbh it pretty accurately lines up with US News Research ranks though, hence why those get thrown around as shorthand a lot. If it is very highly ranked there, it's going to be a research powerhouse, have tons of resources and boast an impressive match list. The way to approach it is like I said before - apply to a whole bunch that you might have an interest in, and then after interviews and seeing where you get in, that's when to start worrying about the small differences between similar places, like whether you prefer one city to another or liked one type of curriculum better.

Thank you, you make a good point!

 

[PreMedMissteps]

I did apply to Miami! What's San Diego like? (The school). I like the city other than the expense of living.

Georgia

As an OOS student, I wouldn't bother with applying to any UC meds. The numbers are just bad. I think UCSD gets about 3000 apps from OOS alone (about 7500 total). I think they only matriculate about 30 OOS students. Waste of an app.