worst mistake of my life?

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plasticsday1

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Just found out that NYU is now the ranked #3 med school. Four years ago, I turned down NYU to go to a top 50 school that gave me a full ride. At that time, NYU was just barely outside the top 20, and I thought I made the right choice. Now I'm kicking myself to sleep. Yes, I did save $250k by taking the full ride scholarship. But I had to take a year off for research to try to match plastics from my school. That's $400k's worth of attending salary down the drain. With a #3 ranked school next to my name, I could have matched plastics without the year off. That's a net loss of >$100k. And even with this year off, I still probably won't match as well as if I had gone to a #3 ranked school without the year off.

TLDR: always take school prestige over $$. You can make the money back. You can never get back the prestige, and it might come to bite you in the a$$ when it comes to matching
 
One thing I will agree with is pre-meds often view the financials from their current point of view and not the bigger picture down the road. The funding will always be there via student loans and tens of thousands now could definitely cost you hundreds of thousands later.

OP this is like beating yourself up for not buying bitcoin 10 years ago. No one can predict the future and it seems your situation turned out just fine. Chill bra.
 
Lets_Run said:
God forbid you ever experience a real tragedy.

"worst mistake of my life" Christ, son
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I don't see how someone's relative experience with hardship is relevant. It's true that I haven't had to deal with much on the path to where I am. I don't think that minimizes the gravity of this mistake. If you or anyone could reply or refute my statement with anything fact- or evidence-based, that would be much appreciated. I'm currently seeing my decision as long-term loss in both earnings, prestige, and residency match, and I'm close to vomiting at the thought of it.
 
johnnydrama said:
What an idiot/troll.

If you get a free ride, take it.
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I am not trolling. It's possible that my emotions/state of mind are running high because of this recent discovery about NYU's new rank. Would appreciate actual constructive comments instead of accusations or advice that isn't backed up by anything.
 
BadgerMedCj said:
One thing I will agree with is pre-meds often view the financials from their current point of view and not the bigger picture down the road. The funding will always be there via student loans and tens of thousands now could definitely cost you hundreds of thousands later.

OP this is like beating yourself up for not buying bitcoin 10 years ago. No one can predict the future and it seems your situation turned out just fine. Chill bra.
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That is not a good analogy because you haven't lost anything by not buying the bitcoin. I LOST the prestige that comes with a top 3 ranked school. I LOST the income that I would have made by not needing to take a year off at a top 3 school. And I may have lost a position at a better residency spot due to not being at a top 3 school.
 
plasticsday1 said:
I am not trolling. It's possible that my emotions/state of mind are running high because of this recent discovery about NYU's new rank. Would appreciate actual constructive comments instead of accusations or advice that isn't backed up by anything.
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There are no guarantees in this life.

If you can afford to forgo $200k+ of tuition assistance for a hypothetical extra year of attending salary, more power to you. But your “advice” is bad because nothing is guaranteed.

I would also argue that kind of financial obligation early in ones career can easily be more of a burden than a lost attending year.

NYU VS full ride at Hollywood upstairs medical school? Maybe. But not at another top 50 so stop smoking crack. Fair number of people at NYU also take research years (think somewhere between 10-30%), pretty sure they and some of the other top schools encourage it.

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you’re not trolling. So I’ll rephrase, and I do believe this is constructive.

Don’t be an idiot.
 
plasticsday1 said:
That is not a good analogy because you haven't lost anything by not buying the bitcoin. I LOST the prestige that comes with a top 3 ranked school. I LOST the income that I would have made by not needing to take a year off at a top 3 school. And I may have lost a position at a better residency spot due to not being at a top 3 school.
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USNWR is meaningless. NYU isn't suddenly toe-to-toe with Harvard lol
 
plasticsday1 said:
I don't see how someone's relative experience with hardship is relevant. It's true that I haven't had to deal with much on the path to where I am. I don't think that minimizes the gravity of this mistake. If you or anyone could reply or refute my statement with anything fact- or evidence-based, that would be much appreciated. I'm currently seeing my decision as long-term loss in both earnings, prestige, and residency match, and I'm close to vomiting at the thought of it.
Click to expand...

You're the one that convinced admin we need more mandatory attendence professionalism lectures, aren't you?
 
plasticsday1 said:
Just found out that NYU is now the ranked #3 med school. Four years ago, I turned down NYU to go to a top 50 school that gave me a full ride. At that time, NYU was just barely outside the top 20, and I thought I made the right choice. Now I'm kicking myself to sleep. Yes, I did save $250k by taking the full ride scholarship. But I had to take a year off for research to try to match plastics from my school. That's $400k's worth of attending salary down the drain. With a #3 ranked school next to my name, I could have matched plastics without the year off. That's a net loss of >$100k. And even with this year off, I still probably won't match as well as if I had gone to a #3 ranked school without the year off.

TLDR: always take school prestige over $$. You can make the money back. You can never get back the prestige, and it might come to bite you in the a$$ when it comes to matching
Click to expand...

i am glad I waited several cycles to get into a MD school instead of DO.
 
username456789 said:
This thread is terrible.
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2FD8C5B2-2A18-4295-ADCA-4C94CBC0E324.jpeg
 
plasticsday1 said:
Just found out that NYU is now the ranked #3 med school. Four years ago, I turned down NYU to go to a top 50 school that gave me a full ride. At that time, NYU was just barely outside the top 20, and I thought I made the right choice. Now I'm kicking myself to sleep. Yes, I did save $250k by taking the full ride scholarship. But I had to take a year off for research to try to match plastics from my school. That's $400k's worth of attending salary down the drain. With a #3 ranked school next to my name, I could have matched plastics without the year off. That's a net loss of >$100k. And even with this year off, I still probably won't match as well as if I had gone to a #3 ranked school without the year off.

TLDR: always take school prestige over $$. You can make the money back. You can never get back the prestige, and it might come to bite you in the a$$ when it comes to matching
Click to expand...
Failedatlife, is that you?
 
Aerus said:
It wouldn't matter anyways. You would have applied to residency before this ranking came out had that been true, so either way, your choice is still 100% the same.
Click to expand...

I'm actually applying this upcoming cycle because I took a year off, so actually the rankings have come out before my ERAS is submitted
 
johnnydrama said:
There are no guarantees in this life.

If you can afford to forgo $200k+ of tuition assistance for a hypothetical extra year of attending salary, more power to you. But your “advice” is bad because nothing is guaranteed.

I would also argue that kind of financial obligation early in ones career can easily be more of a burden than a lost attending year.

NYU VS full ride at Hollywood upstairs medical school? Maybe. But not at another top 50 so stop smoking crack. Fair number of people at NYU also take research years (think somewhere between 10-30%), pretty sure they and some of the other top schools encourage it.

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you’re not trolling. So I’ll rephrase, and I do believe this is constructive.

Don’t be an idiot.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the honest reply, I do appreciate it. If I may, what kind of financial obligations are you talking about? I know tons of people about to graduate with 200k in debt, and yet none of them seem to sweat spending their money, or seem to spend any less than I do. I do believe I'll be able to "feel" the lack of financial burden soon, but right now it definitely doesn't seem like I have any less than any of my classmates who did take out big loans
 
Mad Jack said:
USNWR is meaningless. NYU isn't suddenly toe-to-toe with Harvard lol
Click to expand...

Thank you, and to everyone who did post something actually meaningful and not mocking. Could you elaborate on this though? Maybe NYU's 2018 match list doesn't match up to Harvard's. But now that it's ranked #3, it basically is as good as HMS, Hopkins, Stanford, Penn, etc. and it's match list in the next year or two should skyrocket. As I said, money can be easily replaced but prestige is forever and that's what's really biting at me
 
OutRun said:
You're the one that convinced admin we need more mandatory attendence professionalism lectures, aren't you?
Click to expand...

I hate professionalism and ethics lectures as much as the next guy. How is this relevant?
 
Osteoth said:
Why do you think prestige matters as much as you have implied in this thread?
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Because I've seen the match lists of the most prestigious schools and the less prestigious schools. There's an enormous difference, especially in fields like plastics.
 
plasticsday1 said:
Thank you for the honest reply, I do appreciate it. If I may, what kind of financial obligations are you talking about? I know tons of people about to graduate with 200k in debt, and yet none of them seem to sweat spending their money, or seem to spend any less than I do. I do believe I'll be able to "feel" the lack of financial burden soon, but right now it definitely doesn't seem like I have any less than any of my classmates who did take out big loans
Click to expand...

By not having >$200k in non-dischargeable loans, you're free to pursue a specialty that you actually enjoy instead one that will pay down your loans the fastest. Even if you're currently interested in a high-paying specialty regardless, you can be sure it's something you actually are interested in.

You're able to start seriously contributing to your retirement funds and building a portfolio of investments immediately after graduating medical school, instead of living like a pauper for 5+ years after residency is over or waiting 10-20 years for forgiveness to kick-in.

Just because other people's spending habits now don't appear much different from yours, make no mistake that extra $200k in your pocket to invest now will only serve to benefit you.
 
plasticsday1 said:
Just found out that NYU is now the ranked #3 med school. Four years ago, I turned down NYU to go to a top 50 school that gave me a full ride. At that time, NYU was just barely outside the top 20, and I thought I made the right choice. Now I'm kicking myself to sleep. Yes, I did save $250k by taking the full ride scholarship. But I had to take a year off for research to try to match plastics from my school. That's $400k's worth of attending salary down the drain. With a #3 ranked school next to my name, I could have matched plastics without the year off. That's a net loss of >$100k. And even with this year off, I still probably won't match as well as if I had gone to a #3 ranked school without the year off.

TLDR: always take school prestige over $$. You can make the money back. You can never get back the prestige, and it might come to bite you in the a$$ when it comes to matching
Click to expand...

I don't get it.

You couldn't have predicted that NYU would have shot up from #20-something to #3. It could have just as easily dropped to #30 or #40. Also, you couldn't have known (with the degree of certainty that you have now) that you'd end up pursuing a super-competitive specialty.

Based on the limited information you had at the time of your acceptance, you made the right choice. Now, in hindsight, it may not have been. Oh, well. Sometimes you go all-in with dual Aces against an inferior hand and then lose on the river. That's life.
 
plasticsday1 said:
Just found out that NYU is now the ranked #3 med school. Four years ago, I turned down NYU to go to a top 50 school that gave me a full ride. At that time, NYU was just barely outside the top 20, and I thought I made the right choice. Now I'm kicking myself to sleep. Yes, I did save $250k by taking the full ride scholarship. But I had to take a year off for research to try to match plastics from my school. That's $400k's worth of attending salary down the drain. With a #3 ranked school next to my name, I could have matched plastics without the year off. That's a net loss of >$100k. And even with this year off, I still probably won't match as well as if I had gone to a #3 ranked school without the year off.

TLDR: always take school prestige over $$. You can make the money back. You can never get back the prestige, and it might come to bite you in the a$$ when it comes to matching
Click to expand...
The only people who care about rankings are ignorant pre-meds and med school deans. PDs don't care. They already know the quality of graduates.
0/10 trolling. In my day, trolls were Trolls! You had to work to be a troll. Now any idiot can troll.
 
plasticsday1 said:
I'm actually applying this upcoming cycle because I took a year off, so actually the rankings have come out before my ERAS is submitted
Click to expand...

You don't seem to understand how time works, so let me break it down to you.

Had you gone to NYU:

-Arrive as an MS4 during 2017-2018 cycle.
-NYU ranked 20
-Still need to take a research year
-MS4 during 2018-2019 cycle
-Your application is from a rank 3 school, but you took a research year anyways and save no extra money, but now you will have 300k+ in loans with interest.

OR

-Arrive as an MS4 during 2017-2018 cycle.
-NYU ranked 20
-Do not take a research year and apply plastics
-MS4 during 2017-2018 cycle
-Your application is from a rank 20 school instead of a rank 3 school.

The school you are at now:

-Arrive as an MS4 during 2017-2018 cycle.
-Your school ranked in top 50
-Still need to take a research year
-MS4 during 2018-2019 cycle

You would have taken a research year regardless and had you not, your application would not have come from a rank 3 school. You entered medical school a year too early to experience a rank 3 school during your MS4 year without a research year.
 
Goro said:
Failedatlife, is that you?
Click to expand...

#TheGloriousReturn

plasticsday1 said:
I know tons of people about to graduate with 200k in debt, and yet none of them seem to sweat spending their money, or seem to spend any less than I do.
Click to expand...

I have a special word for these kinds of people: idiots.

They can go ahead and spend their money and continue to rack up debt. In the meantime, I'll take my minimal loans and solid investments, retire at 60, and continue to live like an attending for the rest of my life. Meanwhile, they'll have to either keep working into their 70's or retire and have to live a mediocre lifestyle. Don't let your med school/residency spendthrifts fool you into thinking they're so financially well off, because they're going to be paying for it for decades (literally).

plasticsday1 said:
But now that it's ranked #3, it basically is as good as HMS, Hopkins, Stanford, Penn, etc. and it's match list in the next year or two should skyrocket.
Click to expand...

Except it's not, and every PD in the country will know it because they know that Doximity and USNWR rankings are complete BS. You're not going to see some magical improvement in their rank lists because the people that actually matter in determining what those rank lists look like (ie program directors) don't care about that jump in rankings.

aymar said:
Someone please explain to this guy how loans and compounding interest works. That 250K scholarship was worth WAY more than that.
Click to expand...

Sure, if he takes 10 years to pay back that $250k (that's not including residency, so we're assuming he's paying off that $250k within 5 years of finishing residency), then at 6.8% interest that 250k turns into 480k, so OP is actually not losing money even by taking that year off, he's still $80k ahead. So it's still the correct choice financially, even with taking that year off for research.
 
plasticsday1 said:
Just found out that NYU is now the ranked #3 med school. Four years ago, I turned down NYU to go to a top 50 school that gave me a full ride. At that time, NYU was just barely outside the top 20, and I thought I made the right choice. Now I'm kicking myself to sleep. Yes, I did save $250k by taking the full ride scholarship. But I had to take a year off for research to try to match plastics from my school. That's $400k's worth of attending salary down the drain. With a #3 ranked school next to my name, I could have matched plastics without the year off. That's a net loss of >$100k. And even with this year off, I still probably won't match as well as if I had gone to a #3 ranked school without the year off.

TLDR: always take school prestige over $$. You can make the money back. You can never get back the prestige, and it might come to bite you in the a$$ when it comes to matching
Click to expand...

NYU, along with every other school, is basically the same school it was 4 years ago. Not sure what makes you think it's now #3 or #20 or #100 but nobody who knows anything about medicine or life in general is suddenly going to accept it as such just because whatever stupid survey or ranking just declared it as such.

Come on man for somebody smart enough to get a full ride to a US medical school I can't believe . . . oh wait a minute this must be a troll post. You got me!
 
plasticsday1 said:
Just found out that NYU is now the ranked #3 med school. Four years ago, I turned down NYU to go to a top 50 school that gave me a full ride. At that time, NYU was just barely outside the top 20, and I thought I made the right choice. Now I'm kicking myself to sleep. Yes, I did save $250k by taking the full ride scholarship. But I had to take a year off for research to try to match plastics from my school. That's $400k's worth of attending salary down the drain. With a #3 ranked school next to my name, I could have matched plastics without the year off. That's a net loss of >$100k. And even with this year off, I still probably won't match as well as if I had gone to a #3 ranked school without the year off.

TLDR: always take school prestige over $$. You can make the money back. You can never get back the prestige, and it might come to bite you in the a$$ when it comes to matching
Click to expand...

There are some things in life money cannot buy.

Always go with prestige with regard to training.

People that claim "better fit" are just coping hard

You messed up.
 
plasticsday1 said:
As I said, money can be easily replaced but prestige is forever
Click to expand...

Wait wait...this whole post is literally about a change in prestige at a school you turned down. So clearly, prestige is not forever


Sent from my iPhone using SDN mobile
 
There's so much wrong with this thread it's hard to know where to start, but I'll give it an honest attempt:

1) You're making a blanket recommendation to "always" choose prestige over money/scholarships. For the majority of medical students, this is bad advice. Most students don't go into plastics, derm, or ENT. Most into less competitive fields that they can match into without a lost year of income. You're in a tiny minority and trying to apply your situation to everyone. For most medical students, saving $250k in loan money is by far the more intelligent move.

In addition, very few know what field they're going to go into as premeds. Expecting people to "anticipate" needing a research year to match when they're college seniors is ludicrous.

2) You're assuming USNWR rankings correlate with NYU's ability to match you into plastics. Let's make this clear ... yes, having a strong home program in your field (especially with well-connected faculty in your field of choice) is a distinct advantage when it comes time to score interviews and match. Having a strong home program will open up more research opportunities and connections. People who come from programs with a home plastics programs are at a distinct advantage.

But NYU is not suddenly better at matching you into plastics because they went from #20 to #3 on an arbitrary rank list. Their national ranking doesn't suddenly mean that their plastics department suddenly became several-fold more prestigious. If an academic center has a strong program, it tends to stay strong for a number of years. If they're #20 in 2014 and #3 in 2018, their ability to match you into plastics didn't suddenly sextuple in 4 years.

When you say something like "But now that it's ranked #3 ...it's match list in the next year or two should skyrocket..." it indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of A) national rankings and B) how to gauge the strength of an academic department. It's a lack of understanding I find concerning in a senior medical student. These are the kind of posts I see in the pre-med forum.

Whatever advantages NYU would have given you for matching plastics existed 4 years ago, when they were "only" #20.

3) You assume attending a high ranked medical school means a research year will not be needed
We interviewed plenty of candidates from the big programs (including NYU) who took dedicated research years. Our associated top-30 medical school happened to match multiple students who did not take a research year. You're again trying to make a correlation that is weak or non-existent at best. In fact, what I've found is that at the top academic programs, sometimes dedicated research years are even more recommended - because faculty are more research oriented than at weaker programs, and because matching to that home program takes more effort since your classmates tend to be more research oriented as well.

4) You're assuming medical school rankings (which are highly arbitrary and controversial) correlate with the strength of a university's particular specialty.
No.

5) Your math is wrong. You're comparing a hypothetical $400k salary to $250k in student debt and ignoring interest. Even if you paid a $250k loan with 6.8% interest over 10 years (highly difficult), that would equal about $350k in payments. That's also far too low of an estimate, because I'm ignoring the accumulation in principal debt during residency. More than likely you haven't lost anything financially at all.

Take a deep breath, stop being so melodramatic, and look at this logically.
 
Last edited:
plasticsday1 said:
Thank you, and to everyone who did post something actually meaningful and not mocking. Could you elaborate on this though? Maybe NYU's 2018 match list doesn't match up to Harvard's. But now that it's ranked #3, it basically is as good as HMS, Hopkins, Stanford, Penn, etc. and it's match list in the next year or two should skyrocket. As I said, money can be easily replaced but prestige is forever and that's what's really biting at me
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This list doesn't mean anything. They shake it up every now and then but match lists from NYU aren't going to look like an actual top 3 school any time soon
 
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