<p>When you get to med school (any US MD school), the trick is to do your best, to be towards the top of your class, which helps if you want to specialize in a highly competitive residency. Although many SOMs use Pass/Fail for grading, they do keep track of some sort of ranking. </p>
<p>My son’s SOM tracks the med students by “quartiles” and they’re regularly told after each exam, “You’re in the X quartile”. If you want a highly competitive residency, then you’d want to be in that top quartile. You’ll get better LORs that way for your residency applications.</p>
<p>No one really cares where you went to MD school. Besides, most applicants are thrilled to get accepted to ONE MD schools since about half of the applicants don’t get any acceptances. My son was very lucky. He only completed 6 med school apps, but was accepted to 3 MD schools. That is not typical at all. No matter which one he would have chosen to attend, it really wouldn’t matter for his ultimate outcome. That depends on him.</p>
<p>That does not mean that an engineering recruiter will preferentially recruit at Ivy League schools over the schools with a top end reputation for engineering.</p>
<p>Let me repeat, it is not worth it to attend an Ivy League school for medical school, or an Ivy League Medical School for residency, or an Ivy League School residency for private practice. The two things we consider when hiring a physician in my area is whether he or she has ties to the area (so they will stay put) and can we get along with that physician. If they went Ivy League for anything, we don’t care and no advantage whatsoever is given. Go Ivy League for medical school or residency if that program is the one you like the best.</p>
<p>A non exact science is something like petrology which heavily utilizes non quantitative observations. Very much a science although less “exact” than physics. Management is not a science. Anyways, back to the OP’s question which has been done a thousand times before on CC.</p>
<p>Thank you, whenwhen. I’m still not sure I understand the distinction, but I now know what petrology is.</p>
<p>But back to the debate: My Beloved toils at a large clinical research hospital and the clinician/researchers where she works have MDs, PhDs, and MD/PhDs, and in an offhand remark to me last week she said an Ivy grad/professional education seems to matter in her department at least as most of the researchers, including the clinicians, have “ivy” post-bacc educations. Maybe she was speaking mostly of PhDs and MD/PhDs, but she said there are a lot of “ivies” and she speculated that having a mentor and letter writer who was one of the leaders in the field, as often happens at the “ivies” makes a difference in whether you get hired into her department, whether it is as a tenure-track, post-doc, what have you. Maybe this dept is an exception, but I’d like to hear anyone else’s thinking on this.</p>
<p>Academic departments at research universities are said to be school prestige conscious, though mainly in terms of one’s PhD school and how it is viewed in that particular field of study. But perhaps someone on the faculty at such a school can comment more.</p>
<p>Maybe it matters in research but how many of you ask a Doctor where he went to school, what his GPA was and where he did is residency before you make an appointment?</p>
<p>I don’t know, I’d feel like I would want to know where my doctor went to school. If you had the choice between a doctor with an M.D from Ohio State University and one from Harvard Medical School, which would you choose?</p>
<p>What about in non-medical fields such as law? I’ve heard that law is different from medicine in that law school (not undergrad) ranking does matter.</p>
<p>And I can definitely see where @kei0486 is coming from. I would much prefer a doctor who went to Harvard than a medical school ranked below the 100 mark.</p>
<p>I would choose the one who was recommended by someone I trusted. The best hand surgeon I have ever seen in my life completed residency at Oklahoma State. Don’t know where he went to undergrad but I know it wasn’t Ivy; he’s a Midwest kid and stayed in the area. He is a DO, so he didn’t go Ivy medschool either. No way would I let any other surgeon touch my hands no matter where they went to school.</p>
<p>You seriously would be misinformed if you chose a doctor stictly by where they went to school. But I can see that no matter how many times I’ve said it doesn’t matter in medicine, some people continue to believe the hype. To each his/her own.</p>
<p>actually, I do note where my docs went to u/g, med school, residency, if they are board-certified, and at which university-affiliated hospital they have admissions privileges, all this before I make the first appointment. I assure you it’s one reason why I’m still breathing. I’ve some damn good, highly educated, up-to-date, docs who use the finest hospitals in the region. </p>
<p>Debakey - famous heart surgeon, Tulane MD
Ben Carson - famous neuro surgeon Michigan MD
Cooley - famous heart surgeon, UTMB MD
Keith Black - neurosurgery pioneer Michigan MD</p>
<p>You would have passed up arguably the best surgeons who have lived for your Harvard Medical School graduate. In fact, you would have ignored where they received their training after medical school.</p>
<p>Since you’re doing three publics, I think it’s only fair to do three privates as well, so I’ll add Princeton to join Harvard and Yale.</p>
<p>All factors being equal? definitely one in the latter camp. But that’s because these are excellent universities, not because they’re part of some league. Stanford’s not part of the Ivy league. Neither is MIT, Chicago, Oxford or Cambridge. But these are all wonderful universities that are generally held to be peers of the three Ivies I discussed earlier, and also peers of the publics.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, Harvard’s a research university like many others. Its professors are distracted with their research and some students don’t feel that they get the close attention they might find at a LAC. But the networking at H is arguably unparalleled, and the opportunities argued by the university itself are also probably vast.</p>
<p>All factors not being equal (in-state tuition vs full pay) I’d probably pick one in the former camp if my family couldn’t afford it. The only students who gain advantage from attending elite schools are those in the low SES bracket and URMs. They’d likely get the same advantage at the publics as they would at the Ivies.</p>
<p>You know, I have no idea where either my internist, ENT, or pain doctor went for UG, medical school or residency. Seriously! I just chose them because after working with them for years, I knew they were the best at what they did.</p>