Feinberg Residency Matching

<p>I was looking over the math list for Northwestern's Feinberg medical school, and I wanted to get possibly some other doctor's opinions about Feinberg. More specifically, I want to go into ophthamology, so how would Feinberg medical school rank here? Would it be better or worse than Brown's Alpert Medical school? Thanks!</p>

<p>Matching into a competitive specialty like ophtho has much more to do with your performance in med school than it does with the med school you attend. Like all ROAD specialties, ophtho requires board scores in the top 5% nationally, top grades in med school coursework and clinical rotations, relevant research w/publication during med school and strong LORs from your clinical attendings esp during your ophtho rotations.</p>

<p>Looking at match lists is not especially useful for non-med students because you don’t know which residency programs are strong and which ones aren’t. (HINT; there are residency programs in some specialties at ‘brand name’ school that aren’t terribly good and community hospital residency programs that tops in their field. Also you don’t know which programs are considered toxic for residents.)</p>

<p>Match lists also vary from year-to-year depending on the interests, scores and other restrictions that the graduating students place on their choices. </p>

<p>You also don’t know which students have non academic reasons mandating a specific location (spouses/families etc). Maybe they had to be in a given city and while they didn’t get into the top flight program in that city, they would have gotten into a top flight program elsewhere but that would have been less desirable to them then being in a “lesser” program in the city of their choice.</p>

<p>You can look here to see how much optho puts on school name: <a href=“http://www.siumed.edu/oec/Year4/References/NRMP%20PDSurvey%202012.pdf”>http://www.siumed.edu/oec/Year4/References/NRMP%20PDSurvey%202012.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>You cannot really decide on the selective specialty until you have your Step 1 score and grades. If Med. School is p/f, then all you have are your rotations grades. LORs play some role, but if you have primarily H’s in rotations, then assumption is that LORs will be great. Then the question is how important is Research. For some selective specialties, research is important and so are pubs. However, lately pabs got into shade so to speak as it is practically impossible to get published even when your manuscript is submitted by MD and you went to annual natinal conference with poster presentation and got very positive reviews (article actually published by MD). So, situation is somewhat fluid. But you got the picture that your Med. school is somewhat secondary to your effort.<br>
One thing for sure, those who apply to selective residencies wish to match, where is very secondary even when the job of SO is in jeopardy. People apply to exessive number of residency programs in hope to get reasonable number of interviews and match. </p>