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1.) Academic medicine (being a professor at a medical school; private practice is basically everything else), prestige ("name-branding") matters some.
2.) Super-elective procedures to the super-rich (i.e. liposuction for Hollywood), then name-branding matters quite a bit, but notice that this name-branding is not actually perfect; I'd wager that Stanford or Yale are considered more prestigious than Penn or Wash U even though the opposite is the case in medical fields.
3.) The ROAD to success (Radiology, Ophthalmology, Anesthesiology, Dermatology), then prestige matters some.
-or-
4.) A medically-related but not-medicine career eventually - i.e. if you want to be Mark McClellan, David Kessler or Julie Gerberding.
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<p>I would add a category #5 - which is if you want the flexibility to have a future career that has nothing to do with medicine whatsoever. Prominent examples of these would be author/film director/film producer Michael Crichton, Senator Bill Frist, poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and philosopher William James. They all got their MD's from Harvard Medical School.</p>
<p>I find it interesting that Harvard Medical School's most famous alumni are all famous for things that have nothing to do with medicine. I suppose that is part of the Harvard mystique.</p>