<p>when looking at medical school's matchlists, what is that a person should actually look for. Is it the amount of people going into each field, or is it the school they go to?</p>
<p>I second this question</p>
<p>I know people say "oh look at the match list"</p>
<p>I don't know why they say that. Yes, if a school is sending a surprising number of students to Harvard for Internal Med or CHOP for Peds it might mean something, but at least at my medical school, with the 4th years I'm friends with, not one put a residency program #1 on their rank-order list simply because it was a #1 residency program. My friends all made their decisions based on personal preference which included a lot of things like how they were treated while on their interview, how they liked the hospital, the city they would be going to (for my friends this was probably the #1 thing, a lot of people chose based on where they hoped to end up), and in some cases - the sort of benefits package they got (one friend who matched Anesthesia at Arizona is doing his transitional year in Des Moines b/c they will pay for his housing). Basically the question they were answering was "will I be able to enjoy spending 3-7 years of my life with these people, in this area? If I stick around the area after residency, will I be happy?"</p>
<p>The only thing I think would raise a red flag for me if going over match lists, is if they list how many students got into one of their top 3 choices. Nationwide that number is 84% of everyone who matches. If a school is significantly lower than that, it might be worrisome, BUT, if that's the only medical school you get accepted to, are you really going to turn them down?</p>
<p>I wouldn't look at who's going into what field, because that's simply a personal preference, not anything the school is doing to push me one direction or another. I want to go into peds, what the hell would that tell you on a match list? </p>
<p>Likewise, as I've mentioned, is most people aren't necessarily looking for #1 programs, what is that going to be mean? If I matched at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore or some other community based hospital (not an academic medical center), what would that tell you? Probably very little.</p>
<p>Again, look for positive and negative outliers, but it probably doesn't mean much. </p>
<p>A better list might be if you could find the lists from the residency programs themselves about where their residents are from and use that if there was some significant pattern...</p>
<p>Obviously there's a few prestige departments that you need to make sure to check for in deciding whether a school is really an elite medical school. You could just look for the big-name schools that have residency programs (Harvard/Beth Israel, Columbia/Presbyterian, etc.), but there are plenty of elite residencies that don't have medical schools associated with them -- Princeton-Plainsboro and Seattle Grace come to mind. If a school isn't matching a single kid into PPTH or SGH, that should raise serious questions about their prestige.</p>