<p>Lets pick a general case, say you have a student that wants to be a Surgeon [Neurosurgeon]--actually my friend Carl wants to do this, he's a Senior at JHU--but anyway, now how much does the Prestige of this person's Medical School [Carl for example] affect his future in medicine. </p>
<p>Say Carl goes to Harvard or Johns Hopkins [the best 2 medical schools, right?] and graduated with Top marks, etc. vs. him going to a "lesser" colleges, like a state school or non-Harvard/JHU school and still gets top marks, what difference does it make?</p>
<p>Consider both cases: him working for a hospital or having his own practice! </p>
<p>No, that's Chirag Joshi, this is a different friend...don't know about you, but I DO have a lot of friends, lol...but yeah, chirag saved my ass in Physics...nice guy!</p>
<p>Everyone you run into will tell you prestige does not matter..... However, look at the match lists at schools like Johns Hopkins Med and decide for yourself to see if that's actually true.</p>
<p>A match list is the list of the residencies that each school's medical students get into.</p>
<p>In response to #7:
--First, one has to ask: how much does residency matter? Obviously specialty matters, but the name-brand on a program doesn't matter that much in terms of private practice docs anyway.
--Second, how can you tell the difference between the effect of the school and the effect of the student?
--Third, I believe our advice on here has been very clear that we think medical school DOES affect residency selection, but that it is not the most important factor.</p>
<p>Also, it should be mentioned that as anything earlier than a late 3rd or 4th year med student, you will likely have almost no idea what residencies within a specialty are better than others. One cannot just go by the name brand of the hospital, and the reputations of various residency programs fluctuate somewhat dramatically given staff turnover, facility upgrades, etc.</p>
<p>Yeah...match lists are absolutely not helpful...</p>
<p>1) Location is an extremely important consideration for many people and will affect where they apply.</p>
<p>2) Specialty may give you some idea but...in almost every specialty but derm and plastics if you're willing to go into a malignant, low ranked program, you can be any type of physician. If you're willing to go to Maine, New Mexico or North Dakota or Alaska or some other out of the way place, your chances improve for even the most competitive residencies.</p>
<p>3) How are you going to assess the numerous extremely high quality community based programs which have no academic name associated with them? Unless you know the ins and outs of a particular specialty, you're going to make faulty judgements.</p>