I will most likely be attending my state’s university which I’m excited about
and I understand prestige of a student’s undergrad school may matter more to some schools than to others,
and I understand that I’ll still have to work hard to keep my gpa up, score high on the MCAT, and get involved in extracurriculars
but how much does Stanford care?
Also, if there’s anyone who has ever been to Stanford medical school or knows someone there, I’d like to know as much as I can about what it’s like from more people with first-hand experience
Actually my reading of the above profile is that Stanford does care a lot about one’s undergraduate school with almost half of their first year class coming from Stanford, Harvard, Yale and MIT.
Are you forgetting that the first round of admits at all those schools are well stocked with people whose portfolios are outstanding rather than someone just worried about how they “look”?
“Actually my reading of the above profile is that Stanford does care a lot about one’s undergraduate school with almost half of their first year class coming from Stanford, Harvard, Yale and MIT.”
It doesn’t mean that Stanford “cares.” It may mean that the applicant pool is highly skewed towards Stanford, Harvard, Yale and MIT.
It is sloppy thinking to think that half of the first year class comes from those schools means that they “care” about those schools. Maybe 10% of the applicant pool came from those schools and they “overfavor” them such that they make up 50% of the admitted class. Or maybe 75% of the applicant pool came from those schools and they “underfavor” them since they don’t want 75% of their class from those schools. The point is, you simply don’t know.
BTW, there’s nothing magical about Stanford medical school. Medical school is a very “flat” field compared to law and business. You aren’t going to get anything special or make more coming out of Stanford med school than you would any other med school. Med school is truly one of those wherever you get in is good enough.
@pizzagirl, don’t know that I would totally agree with that. Some specialties are much more competitive to land a residency spot, with very small numbers of practitioners (eg Neurosurgeons), And as such, the perceived quality of the medical school by the heads of residency programs definitely can have some impact on your choices coming into residency.
For neurosurgery (since it was brought up) of the 55 directors who responded, 65% said they consider the school’s rank and their average rating for how important that is was 3.8/5 (5 the most important).
Let’s contrast that letter of recommendation which 98% said they consider and had an average rating of 4.7/5. Even just perceived commitment to the specialty was a 4.6/5 from 80% of responders.
@vandyeyes, the key to @pizzagirl’s comment was the “relatively” flat. In law, if you go outside a top 10 or top 14 law school, it completely closes the door to many firms. In fact many people would say going to law school is no longer even worth it if you’re not at a T14 school. With a high step 1 score, good letters, and honors in your rotations, you can become a neurosurgeon from ANY US medical school. For many of the less competitive specialties, you can easily still land a successful job from ANY US medical school.
I actually have experiences on both sides of the coin for both medicine , residency and fellowship and have connections to several of the named institutions. My partners and I Include Harvard, Yale and Stanford among our pedigrees. Stanford gets somewhere around 7000-8000 applicants per year to it’s medical school. Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Yale altogether probably have less than 1000 applying to medical school per year and many of these applicants will not apply to Stanford. Generally applicants have some realistic notion of their strengths for admission and have geographic preferences. It is probable therefore that less than 1/10 applicants to Stanford Medical school comes from these four schools yet almost half of the class is derived from these institutions. I would be willing to bet that a majority of the remaining class (outside of URM students) come from other top public/private Universities, as well as LAC’s. Medical Schools such as Yale and Harvard may have 20% of their class from their respective schools but no body else has a class that is close 50% for H/S/Y/M.
Now a large portion of what is going on is the selection for students by the top undergraduate Institutions for ambition, academic skills and standardized test taking ability. You can however find students of this caliber at many schools such as UCB, Virginia, Pomona, Chicago, Michigan, UCLA, Amherst, Wellesley etc. Even coming from “lesser” schools with a strong 4.0, MCAT>36 and good research experience and a good interview will make one competitive to practically any medical school One’s academic credentials however will always be interpreted in light of one’s school. The dominance of H/S/Y/M for Stanford Medicine strongly suggests that they have strong undergraduate preferences.
I will agree with Pizzagirl that any US allopathic medical school will allow you to train in your chosen specialty if you do well. Coming out of one of the top schools however will help if you are trying for one of the most competitive specialties with the caveat that some “lesser” medical schools may have great departments in your chosen field and that by itself is helpful.
The survey of PD’s should be taken with a grain of salt for several reasons. First, what the top programs in any competitive field want from residents may be different than the average or below average programs. Secondly, when it is very competitive everything is important. I have heard of at least three instances over the years where ranking the last two applicants of the list came down to their undergraduate institutions.(This is rare but goes to illustrate that everything is important when the competition is high)
I have also always thought of Stanford as a medical school as being somewhat overrated due to it’s association with their undergraduate school and top law, business and graduate schools. Clinically Stanford has some excellent departments but others are more pedestrian. Many Medical schools such as UCLA, UCSF, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Mayo, Michigan, Pittsburgh, Duke, Penn, Wash U etc have stronger clinical attending staff.
Stanford is particularly good if you want to do a MSTP or law or business in combination with medicine. It is a good medical school but there are many just as good for most who want to go into clinical medicine.
I agree. Doctors aren’t as judge-y or prestige-aware wrt to where one attended school as other fields. I think this can partly be attributed to the fact that their customers–patients–are for the most part unaware of where their doctor went to med school and what med schools have good reputations. My brother in law is a vice chairman of his department at Stanford, and he went to some backwater medical school in the deep south. No one really cares, since he is one of the best clinicians in his field and his lab brings in big grant dollars. Imagine a Harvard law school or business school professor having a degree from West Virginia or Mississippi State. I’m not saying it never happened, but it’s gotta be really really rare.
US MD schools all teach the same thing. There isn’t “special teaching” going on at the various
“top” SOMs.
Furthermore, an undergrad may be rather unknown or modestly ranked, but it may have a well-ranked med school.
My own son is confident that as long as he does very well, and does very well on his exams, that he’ll get into the specialty that he wants. His med school is well-ranked, but it’s not a “top ten” med school.
Stanford has a very small medical school compared to Harvard, Columbia, Penn, but they are still taking 20% from their own school. That’s huge. Half of the students in the Ivy league med schools are from the Ivy League schools.
It’s obvious if almost half are from 4 schools that it does matter. You presumably need high grades at a top school. Also, probably 85% plus are from top 30 or so schools. This isn’t my field, but when I was at Johns Hopkins very few undergrads from there got into their med school. I knew someone who went to JHU med school and was an undergraduate at UCLA with a 4.0. If you have close to 4.0 from a state school and higher than the 36 or so average MCATs for top med schools, it is worth applying.
There isn’t as much difference as with law or MBA, but the top med school can probably help you get into a lucrative specialty and/or a practice in a wealthy area. There is also a lot of money and connections involved in top professional school admissions.
No, that’s not how statistics work. Students are not randomly distributed across undergraduates. The top undergrads in the country have the top students in the country. They are more likely to apply to medical school and more likely to be successful when they do. Therefore the top medical schools are more likely to be populated by graduates of the top schools. It’s not 0, but if you look at the applications from the alumni of those 4 schools you’ll see they are far more impressive than the name on the diploma. As you climb down the medical school rankings the influence of your diploma might come up, but it’s still going to be a tiny effect at most.
Successfully matching into lucrative [read: competitive] specialty is matter of standardized test scores, academic success, relevant research and LORs from preceptors, not the med school you attend. (see Charting the Outcomes in the Match–http://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Charting-Outcomes-2014-Final.pdf)
And for getting into a practice in a certain geographic region/wealthy suburb, that is far, far more dependent on where one does a residency than where one attends med school.
It is probably as hard to get into any US medical school (except things like WV or MS in state admission) as to into a top 10 or 20 law or MBA school. That is one reason it doesn’t matter as much where you went.
It is harder to get into a top medical school than a top 6 school undergraduate, so it would be natural most of the students at top medical schools went to top undergraduate schools.