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USC vs UCI vs Northwestern
- Thread starter MrCaduceus
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When choosing between these schools, they're all relatively prestigious so that shouldn't be too much of a worry here. A big thing I've always heard is to "go wherever you can get a job after you graduate". Since they're all nice schools, take prestige out of the question for now. Cost will be a major factor, as well as survivability (friends/weather/social life), because prestige can't really secure you a *much* higher salary after graduating, plus your specialty isn't too competitive to where it will matter where you went. So, UCI sounds like the best option to me. But of course, this is a huge decision, so take as many opinions as you can! 
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UCI. Obviously I'm just going based on your pros/cons above, so maybe what you actually value will be different, but this is why I'd say UCI:
- The relative difference in prestige between UCI and USC is not worth ~$140k. I'm not even sure there is a relative difference in prestige, but even if you give USC the slight edge, it is definitely not worth anywhere near $140k. LAC has a cool patient population and would offer great clinical experience, but if you end up doing EM, away rotations are necessary to match, so you can just do an away rotation there anyways. So, I ruled out USC.
- Northwestern is trickier because NW is unquestionably a top 20 school, so you would definitely get a prestige bump by going there. $95k is also right on the border of being a deciding amount, although a lot of this comes down to personal preference/financial situation. Part of determining if the financial cost of a school is worth it is considering not just your financial situation, but your goals, so I pivoted to thinking about your stated career goals...
- Derm and EM require away rotations, so in a lot of ways, although school still matters, you'll have the opportunity to do rotations at schools you're interested in. Derm is ridiculously competitive. Maybe the most competitive specialty. You are going to need top everything (research, preclinical grades, clerkships grades, LORs, etc). It's easy to assume that going to a top school helps in terms of competitive specialties, and I think it does to a certain extent especially with networking and research opportunities, but given the level of competition, even students from top schools still need to have top everything. Students from lower ranked schools (with the necessary stats) still match to all the most competitive specialties, they just match less often to the Harvard/USCF/JHU residencies in these specialties (likely due to the networking/prestige factor). So since you mentioned not wanting to go into academia, I'm not sure what specific advantages you'd get out of going to NW. Outside of the top-tier academic residencies/fellowships, name matters much less and if you want to match locally in CA, being from the area and having gone to school in the area might carry you further (although nobody in CA is going to look down on NW).
- Not super informed about MBAs, so not sure how much I can offer about these. I do know you can always do your MBA at a different school, if you wanted to do med school at one place and the MBA at a different (potentially more well-known) business school. However, my sense is that it would probably be easier and cheaper to do them at the same place and that the ranking of your business school as a MD/MBA probably matters significantly less than say for a regular MBA.
