What Matters More Your Undergraduate University Or The Place You Do Your Residency/Fellowship?

In Medicine, what matters more your undergraduate university or the place you do your residency/fellowship training in terms of employment?




This question was originally posted on Quora.com and was answered by Mitul Mehta, Assistant Professor of Vitreoretinal surgery, UC Irvine/Gavin Herbert Eye Institute


Very clearly it matters in this order:

1. Fellowship
2. Residency
3. Medical school
4. Undergraduate University/Graduate School

The thing about medical school as was pointed out is that state medical schools are a great deal financially and so are considered equivalent to going to a top tier medical school. When I interview fellowship applicants I’m not going to fault someone who went to the University of Kansas when they had the application to get into an elite school.

Full Disclosure: 2 of my cousins went to KU for medical school. I went to an expensive private medical school. They had a lot less debt than I did.

The problem with going to a top medical school or college is that the bottom person in Harvard’s class is not going to be better than the top person at ANY medical school in the US. People are complicated and getting into college and medical school is incredibly competitive so something small can kill an application.

Where one does their actual post graduate training really matters. This tells us what kind of cases and workload they were accustomed to and how well they were trained at it to some degree. If someone comes out of USC/LA County hospital or New York Eye & Ear Infirmary I know they can work through a ton of complicated patients in a stressful environment. They may not be well published because they were busy in the clinic and operating room.

For a private practice job, that is what they care about. Actually doing work seeing patients.

If one wants an academic job they are probably being hired for less clinical skills and more academic pursuits. In this case their publications matter more. Their research plan might be very different than what they did in graduate school but they still need the validation of coming from a good training program (residency/fellowship) with attendings who will go to bat for you.

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