How To Choose A Medical School In 2023

Congratulations! If you are reading this, chances are you have received an acceptance to medical school! The next four years of your life will likely be grueling, rewarding, challenging, and hopefully exciting to you personally. You have embarked on a worthwhile journey to becoming a doctor, but how do you get there? If you are even more fortunate, you may be deciding between multiple medical schools. How do you decide? At Appletto, we have gone through the trouble to incorporate ratings that will influence your quality of life during these four years in which you are studying to become a doctor. This is our personal advice having gone through this process.

Fit - By far the one of the most important characteristics of choosing a medical school is your perceived fit at that school and in the student body. Have you toured the campus? Is this somewhere you can envision being happy outside of your time studying for four years? Do you like the location? Do you have access to entertainment, hobbies you like to engage in, and academic support services (libraries, research staff, etc.)? How did you feel about the medical school on your interview date? Do you have any pre-existing network in that area? Do you have any support system?
Cost - This characteristic is far less talked about but almost, if not equally, important to fit when determining which school to attend. All accredited US medical schools will prepare you to pass your boards, but not all medical schools cost the same. What is your anticipated debt after calculating your total cost of attendance for four years? The median medical school graduate in 2023 owes 215k in debt.[1] While it is true that your attending lifestyle will likely be one of being a high-earner, it is certainly nicer to graduate with as little debt as possible. Just know that interest on federal loans starts accruing from the date of disbursement. It is not unheard of for people to have north of $300-400k in debt from medical school alone. This amount of debt can be crippling and influence your decision over which specialty to practice. You need to factor in living expenses, educational expenses, travel expenses if you are living away from home or traveling for research, etc.
Quality and Diversity of Rotation Sites - Does your school have a teaching hospital associated with it? Is it an academic or community hospital? The quality and diversity of your rotation sites is paramount to becoming a good clinician because it will give you that initial exposure to experiences caring for complicated patients and also afford you insight into how your attending physicians think through complex medical problems. Some medical schools also will have you rotating far away for clinical sites which may or may not be advantageous to your career goals, so this is something to bring up in your interviews as well as a factor that should be on your radar when deciding which medical school to attend.
Graduation rate - Does your medical school accept a large number of students, and then fail to prepare them for graduation and practice in residency? Graduation rate is one objective data marker that can help you infer just how supportive your medical school administration is of its students.
Match list - The match list is a list of where everyone in a medical school has matched to their residency position through the National Residency Match Program’s “Match”. The Match occurs in the spring and can at times be used to delineate the quality or strength of a medical school. A word of caution though, the match list is comprised of individuals, many of which have differing strengths and weaknesses who worked very hard to get where they have matched, and while this is a reflection on said medical school’s educational preparation it is also highly student-specific.
Educational resources - Do you have access to educational resources through your school? Is it provided to you for free? Is it the gold standard resource, or a knock off resource for your learning? These are things you have to think about. Chances are you can just buy the gold standard resources, but if they are incorporated in your tuition price, that will make it easier for you since your loans (if you are taking them out) will cover that for you.
Research opportunities - It is no secret that attending a highly ranked medical school in the research category very likely affords you a lot of chances at participating in research projects that will strengthen your application to residency as well as engage you in extra-curricular academic ways building your professional network and teaching you something worthwhile on the subject matter. Be discriminating in choosing a research project. Is the idea a good one? Or, are you just jumping on the first idea you were presented? Will this paper be easily published? Do you have the support of statisticians and other ancillary staff from your library or clinical department? How robust your medical school’s research offerings are can greatly influence how much time you spend going from idea → publication. Also, learn to maximize each written publication as a poster and/or abstract first at the least. On ERAS® the Electronic Residency Application Service® (ERAS®), you are asked to list research experiences and can break it down by type.

[1] https://educationdata.org/average-medical-school-debt