I'm a fourth year at Michigan so I'll just comment on what I know. Yale is obviously an amazing school but I don't know enough about its program to compare it to ours. As for the "prestige" thing - Yale definitely has the Ivy League name which will impress people, but in the medical world Michigan's reputation is at least as respected, if not more, depending on the field. Michigan just started a "new" curriculum this year, which boils down basically to a systems-based approach (lectures are not dramatically changed, more of a reshuffling of material) with dedicated blocks of clinical education (previously clinical education in the first two years was mixed in with regular basic science classes haphazardly). There will be more elective time during your third year so that you can explore other fields like Radiology, Derm, Anesthesiology, etc... early on to see if you might be interested instead of waiting until fourth year when you're months from applying to residency. Ann Arbor is a nice college town with enough to do - you're not going to find the same night life as a larger city but the nicer Detroit suburbs are less than an hour away. The clinical exposure at Michigan I feel is second to none. Like you mentioned, the hospital system here is amazing and extremely modern... pretty much everything is computerized and facilities are always expanding, with big names in almost every department, especially the surgical subspecialties and pediatrics. For the preclinical years - all lectures are videotaped and placed online via streaming video so you can review lectures or just watch them from home instead of coming to class. Most lecture handouts and notes are available on the web as well. The entire campus is wireless internet enabled so you can do your work from pretty much anywhere in the hospital or med school, even the undergrad campus. We do extremely well in the Match and place people across the country in very competitive specialties. I know people have posted in the past about how Michigan tends to retain its graduates but we placed many people on both coasts this year (only 1/5 stayed at Michigan) and most of those people had little if any ties to the coasts. I've noticed a long-running thread on this board about match lists and just want to say that you shouldn't measure the strength of a school by how many graduates they place at UCSF or MGH or Hopkins. It's very field dependent and as shocking as it may sound - MGH is not the best place to do every residency. Of course, it's hard to know at this stage of the game when you're about to start medical school, but unless you're applying to the field, you might not know that University of Iowa has one of the top orthopedic surgery programs in the country or that UAB is a great place for general surgery, etc... Many factors go into a person's choice for residency, including family, lifestyle, community vs. academic, etc. Bottom line is that graduating from Michigan will not hinder you in any way when it comes to match time. I will say that Michigan is still primarily churns out subspecialists... not too many people go into primary care so if you are dead-set on primary care, you might want to take that into consideration. Michigan also has a reputation for being competitive, which is more class dependent than anything. Some classes, for whatever reason, are very laid back, others more uptight. Regardless, the atmosphere is never malignant and during the pre-clinical years, it's irrelevant since M1 year is P/F and M2 year is H/HP/P/F without a curve, meaning anyone and everyone can get honors if they score above 94%. The M3 year is graded on a curve so only 15% of people get honors, 35% HP, 50% Pass and I think based on this people have come to believe that our M3 year is "brutal". Again, I have nothing to compare it to but you can definitely schedule your M3 year to be "easier" in fields you may not necessarily be interested in (i.e. rotating at a private community hospital vs. UM). In the past, people have commented that the paucity of honors given M3 year may negatively affect how program directors view our students' grades, which I can't speak to directly, except to say that the breakdown of how many people get H/HP/P for all the rotations is detailed in your Dean's Letter so people know how rigorous the clinical program is. If you have any specific questions, please feel free to PM me. You can't go wrong with either school - you just have to figure out how you learn best since Michigan and Yale are pretty different in their educational philosophies.
This is the best freakin emoticon of all. I love it. At any rate, I think that you should go to Yale if you want to become a dermatologist. Otherwise, come to Michigan. Pretty simple, eh?
