Einstein is immediately out because the gap between AE and Emory/CWRU is very large, especially with you wanting academia. "Regional bias" is irrelevant here, prestige trumps that. I just matched at a top tier IM program in NYC and I'm currently at a med school similar in prestige to CWRU/Emory and chose that over a much less prestigious NE school, I truly don't think I would've had the success I had if I went to the lower ranked school. You can be an average student at CWRU/Emory and still match very well whereas you'd have to stand out more at Einstein, especially for the most competitive specialties and programs. Your job in med school is primarily to set yourself up to get the best possible residency for you.
Emory and CWRU are essentially equal, so it sounds like Emory is the better fit for you. Cheaper, more aligned with your career interests and the opportunities Emory has. I would also argue that moving to a new city and far away from your family/friends is an extremely valuable opportunity to become more independent, make you more mature and grow in having to 'start over' and make you a stronger individual. Atlanta certainly beats Cleveland and you will have plenty of time to live life and take advantage of all that Atlanta offers.
I really love when people confidently give advice while having little idea what they are actually talking about. Your experience is n=1, and it is based on assumptions that you made about your success that may be totally off-base. If you would like to pm me your board scores, class quartile, AOA status, research, etc. – as well as the program you matched – we can have a more candid discussion on whether your school gave you a significant boost, or whether (likely) your perception of your candidacy (or how competitive your program is) are undervalued/mismatched.
Anecdote won’t land you in journals for a reason. I prefer to go with numbers.
I said that there is little effective difference in “prestige” between these institutions, and it was for a reason. While it is due in small part to the hear-say of “ ’x’ program is top tier” from career-progressed physician scientists (which applies to all 3), it is in much larger part because of
class outcomes. After all, as a much wiser physician has said: “
prestige is fairy dust; sprinkle some, and you’ll look like magic to one person, and an idiot covered in dirt to another.”
Case, Einstein and Emory have large classes, matching a large number of students into specialties in academic medicine. You mentioned IM, and I think it’s a solid specialty to focus on for the best, semi-objective method of evaluating academic-based match list outcomes (I won’t go into detail here as to why this is so, as I have already written elsewhere. To condense: specialty interests vary annually with the job market and student proclivities, and regionally with school mission/culture. All of these introduce too many confounding variables to evaluate the specialties matching only a few students every year. IM, in contrast, consistently accrues the largest number of graduating students, with wide variances in competition between programs; less variables, bigger “n”).
Let’s evaluate class outcomes. Using the IM boards to gauge “program desirability,” and NIH funding by department to medical schools for “research strength” (
Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research), we can define the general “top” academic research residencies. Then, we can take both the # and % of students matching into said residencies over a 4-5 year average to find a general idea for a school’s success in matching students to top research residencies.
Result: Emory, Einstein, and Case all similarly match 28-48 students every year to IM programs. ~52% of IM matches for Emory students are top 15 research-based programs. Case is at ~60%, and Einstein at ~52%. Not much difference, if at all.
But these are only match results, right? It might be the only thing that M4’s neurotically obsess over, but if you know anything about academic medicine, your long-term career success is defined by “publish, or perish” (extrapolated – your success is determined by the productivity of your career, including your manuscripts; the grants you receive; the awards you attract; the clinical trials you conduct).
But these are much more convoluted measures to evaluate, with difficult-to-track records that would take an eon to sort through and analyze… which is why I’m so glad that several prominent physician-scientists teamed up with Doximity to do it for me, and published it in the AAMC official journal (
https://journals.lww.com/academicme...a_Top_Research_Medical_School__A_Call.20.aspx).
In a gargantuan analysis that looked at all of the awards, grants, publications, and clinical trials that 600,000+ medical graduates produced from over 120 medical schools across the past 60 years, Einstein came out as #13 in graduate success, followed by Case as #15, and Emory somewhere outside the top 25.
What about research funding? Averaging the rankings of NIH funding for these three schools over the past 20 years has NIH funding for Case at #25; Einstein at #28; Emory at #18. But Emory has more PI’s than either Case or Einstein that is disproportional to the difference in funding, so the funding/investigator is greater at Case and Einstein than at Emory.
All of this to say: I believe, honestly, it is a fool’s errand to try and pick-and-parcel between these three schools. Goro likes to group med schools in “classes” in terms of their reputation and research output, which I think is the best approach (and, coincidentally, he labels the “research powerhouse” class as “Einstein/Emory").
To focus back on things that actually matter: I repeat, for effect - your class's success will not define
your success. I provided this data because I like both meta-analyses, and giving advice that is as accurate as possible. But the truth is that none of these factors account for any of the intrinsic values selected for at “top” schools (i.e., academic giftedness, perseverance/grit, sociability, organizational skills, both short- and long-term planning, etc.) that actually correlate with student success in academics. Top schools generally attract top talent that make the schools look better with their success, which in turn provides a halo effect back to new students, but this halo effect is nominal. There are some institutions that will limit your success, but even those aren’t dealbreakers with enough qualities mentioned above. None of those schools are part of your options, regardless.
You will do fine wherever you choose to go. But you will do excellent if you find your core passions outside of your peers' opinions, and have them fuel you through the slog and strife that medical school, and beyond, brings. Consider the opinions and feedback of people who you respect, and gently nod, smile absently, and filter-out the opinions of those who clout-chase throughout your academic career; it'll save you a lot of trouble (and sanity).
