...
Only here on SDN do people suggest that the med school you attend won't make a difference. In other disciplines like law or engineering or business, there is tremendous pressure to go to the best programs and from what I understand from classmates going into these areas, recruiters are very aware of the differences in institutions which translates into the quality of the student who graduates from the better programs.
It's not on SDN -- program directors complete a survey periodically which states what they consider important. The school name is ALWAYS deep in this list, far below things like Step 1, clinical year evaluations etc. Additionally those of us in residency can tell you that in your and every field, you are going to be working with co-residents who went to brand name and not so brand name med schools -- and both are going to be pretty solid. If you go to a non-brand name school, you can still do derm or plastics. You can still do an academic fellowship. It simply comes down to you. Honestly, it matters in pre-allo on SDN far more than it matters anywhere else.
Now I won't say that you wouldn't have more research opportunities at a research heavy school. You may have more faculty who are in the major academic societies and editors of the major journals and can plug you into opportunities on those things. But frequently a place without as many bigwigs is a place where you can actually network with faculty members to the point that they will actually pick up the phone on your behalf come residency time. Some of those folks from less stodgy ivy towers seem to have had folks do a whole lot more for them to get them into good residencies.
But in terms of what matters, go to where you think you would be happiest, because where you are happiest is where you will thrive, do well on Step 1, and really learn. And that matters a whole lot more than the name on the hospital. Match lists don't matter because that mostly reflects where folks want to go, not where they could get. The top student at many (most) med schools goes into IM or surgery each year. That doesn't mean they couldn't get derm, it means they didn't want derm. For most people, it's about going into what you want to do for a living.
It's easier to appreciate at the end of med school, but as a premed, you have no clue what you are going to like, dislike, and what you think you can stand doing all day, every day for the next 40 years. It's not about the money, it's not about the prestige. It's about what you enjoy, find interesting, and want to make a career of. Additionally, lots of people have reasons to stay in certain areas, to follow spouses, etc by the end of med school. So their residency choices may reflect that a lot more than where they could get. And so on. Most of the time you have no clue from a match list as to what a person could get, just what they chose. You also don't know what programs are good versus malignant (and all hospitals have some good and some bad programs), so something that looks to you like a brand name place might be a bad choice of residency in a particular specialty. As a premed you won't know this, so you misread the match list as "wow a good place" rather than "boy, this guy must've been scraping the bottom of the barrel in his specialty".
As to the difference in fields like eg. law -- you have to realize that there are many many more law schools out there. There are only about 125 US allo med schools, each with about a 150 person class. In law there are at least 4 times this number of people. Most cities with one med school have multiple law schools, each with larger class sizes. And there aren't the number of jobs out there for law grads. And no big cross school test upon which you can base comparisons like medicine has. So yeah, in law it's so super saturated that you have to only look at the top 20 or so schools. You have nothing else to look at to cull the herd to a manageable level. But in medicine it's the other way round -- there actually are very few med students out there, 16,000 each year competing for 24000 spots, so they (US allo med schools) are all good, and all worthy of program director consideration if paired with a high Step 1. It's not the same analysis at all.
As for business, you don't really go to professional schools for business. The MBA isn't a professional degree, it's a degree you get after you become a business professional. It is meant to allow a business professional to take the next step. Which is why most of the better business schools require 2 years of business experience before you can even apply, and why most employers pay for it. And which in turn is why most people don't regard 90% of them as useful -- something you pay for yourself to make yourself look better for a field that generally hires people without them is simply not as useful. It's an apples and oranges comparison with a JD or MD, where you can't even get into the field without one. I don't know much about engineering, but suspect that it's more academic geared than professionally geared.
i attend a USNWR ranked (not top 50) US allo school, and i have to say that the quality of the basic science instruction so far has been superlative, beyond anything i ever expected. not to mention the fact that most of them were trained at the same research powerhouse institutions as their colleagues at H/JHU/Penn were. how about them apples??
