<p>i was wondering, does where u go for med school have a lot of influence on where u go for your future job? or is it really based on your grades in med school?</p>
<p>for example, if i went to a med school on the east coast, how hard would it be to end up on the west coast for interning/residency/etc?</p>
<p>^ (10 chars)</p>
<p>[Residency</a> in the same location as Medical School - Student Doctor Network Forums](<a href=“Residency in the same location as Medical School | Student Doctor Network”>Residency in the same location as Medical School | Student Doctor Network)
[Location</a> of med school = location of residency? - Student Doctor Network Forums](<a href=“Location of med school = location of residency? | Student Doctor Network”>Location of med school = location of residency? | Student Doctor Network)</p>
<p>overall, most state schools tend to keep a decent %age of their own students in their residency programs. Intuitively this makes sense…most state schools (the notable exceptions being the schools in the state institutions in the Big 10 region) take a huge majority of in-state residents so people have ties to the area. Further soon to be interns are in vastly different life circumstances than entering med students - people are married, might have kids, or are in otherwise long-term relationships, and all these things keep them local. Private schools, lacking that bias will have greater spread as people pick new locations or return to their homestates. However, if you want to move, it’s extremely unlikely that any school is going to keep you from getting out of where you are. I say this with a tiny bit of authority…as far as I’m aware, I’m the only student in the last 10 years that my school has sent to the state I’m headed to this summer for my residency…</p>
<p>My state school sent students to residencies in 28 different states this year (keep in mind some states like Montana and Alaska only have a limited number of programs/specialties available). About 35% stayed in-state.</p>
<p>Now in a practical sense, especially if you’re interested in some of the more competitive specialties one of the major things that can result in you not matching is limiting yourself geographically. It really places an artificial limit on the programs you’ll rank which causes problems. Sometimes there are good reasons (like a spouse has a job in that city) and sometimes not (Grey’s Anatomy is based in Seattle so I want to go there!). Honestly all the people I know personally who had difficulty with the Match did so because they were limited by geography. But on the other hand I know some people who had clear first choices that were geographically based and they ended up with their first choices in fields like Ortho and Rads.</p>
<p>Lastly, sometimes certain programs have great experiences with students from a particular school and so they go out of their way to get students from that school, kind of developing a pipeline. For example Dartmouth Internal Medicine loves students from my school - my dean of students tells everyone applying IM to look at Dartmouth. Likewise with Peds, Ohio State told me when I interviewed that they’ve had at least one resident from my school every year for the last 15 (and they just added another one this year). The University of Utah is commonly referred to “Bigredmed’s school West” because of how often we sent students to their programs, and University of Arizona Anesthesia seems like they might be developing a pipeline after taking students from my school each of the last three years. There’s no way to know these sorts of relationships as an entering student, but they exist and when you do get in and start deciding on residency they can help you. (Obviously this is NOT a reason to choose one school over another though…doing so would be beyond idiotic).</p>
<p>Bottom line, it CAN make difference, but it doesn’t mean that it will.</p>
<p>thanks for the responses guys</p>