<p>"So pretty much NEOUCOM can get you a great residency? Okay, fair enough that’s all you needed to say. "</p>
<p>-Nope, no, no. No Med. School can get you a great residency, not even Harvard. Only you can get you a great residency. Do not loose this point. This is the most important to keep in mind.</p>
<p>Okay, understood med school rank doesn’t matter. board scores do? Am i good?</p>
<p>“Besides, it doesn’t really matter where you go to med school as long as your USMLE scores are good.”</p>
<p>That is the biggest bunch of baloney. Where you went to medical school is one piece of the application, as it is a contributor to the quality of your education, just like everything else. Being from an accredited medical school, is a prerequisite of course - but after that they are not equal and residencies know they are not.</p>
<p>Dr. Roentgen, I appreciate your input but I’m going to have to respectfully disagree…and rather than repeat why I believe rank doesn’t matter, I’ll just point to the first page.</p>
<p>Which med school you go to DOES matter for residency, but it matters much the same way that it does with which undergrad you went to when applying to med school. Yes, going to an ivy is an impressive piece of your med school application, but only if you excelled there. If you didn’t excel at an ivy, you might not even be able to get into med school. If you excel at NEOUCOM and do awesome on boards, then you have a good chance at any top residency just like that guy from Harvard med school does. However, let’s say you had two applicants for top residency of equal-caliber–one went to Harvard Med another went to lower-tier US med school, Harvard Med guy would likely win.</p>
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<p>You wouldn’t know that until you had interviews with both.</p>
<p>The prestige of your med school matters less than your USMLE Step 1 scores. But, that’s not to say it doesn’t matter at all. </p>
<p>Some people looked into this issue: </p>
<p>Green M, Jones P, Thomas JX Jr. Selection criteria for residency: results of a national program directors survey. Acad Med. 2009 Mar;84(3):362-7.</p>
<p>What they found is that it is roughly the 9th thing in importance on the application. That doesn’t sound like much but it is ranked near AOA and medical school research in terms of importance. Competitive residencies may receive hundreds and hundreds of applications for just 1-6 spots. You can’t always separate people based on USMLE scores or 3rd year clerkship grades. Sometimes it will matter whether they have AOA or whether they have research or whether they come from Harvard vs. NEUCOM. </p>
<p>There are other reasons why the medical school you attend matters. As you apply for residency, you realize it’s a small world within each specialty. Everyone knows everyone else. More prestigious medical schools tend to have the big shots in their fields. It is actually quite helpful to get a letter from one of these big shots when applying to residency, even if they don’t know you very well. I know everyone tells you it’s better to get a letter from a professor who knows you really well vs. just someone famous. Well…that’s only partially true in residency admissions.</p>
<p>And because each residency program typically has so few residents, they keep track of where their top residents come from. For example, if the best radiology resident out of 6 total residents this year came from Penn, you might just see the same program take another resident from Penn next year. That’s why it seems certain med schools are always able to send students to certain programs. Likewise, if a resident caused all kinds of trouble for a program, they may not take anyone from that resident’s alma mater for awhile. It’s not usual to hear on the interview trail, “we really like residents from your school. They’ve done a great job for us.” If I were you, I’d rather come from a lineage of Harvard graduates than NEUCOM graduates (with no offense to NEOUCOM).</p>