Medical School Reputation in Match Outcome

I agree.

Also, I forget the exact document, but there was an NRMP document that polled the residency directors in each specialty and had them rank the importance of about 15 different criteria, one of which was medical school prestige. You may try to find that.

I would advise you, and all people looking at medical schools, to carefully evaluate tuition, cost of living, financial aid, and expected debt load you will incur. A private medical school may cost you $250K while a state school may be as little as 30K. Being in a lot of debt is stressful (as if medical school isn't already) and will hurt you as you have to start paying it back in residency. You will easily pay back double the amount of your loan over 30 years.

While a "top tier" medical school will open some doors it is by far not the biggest factor in obtaining a good orthopaedic residency. If you look at any top residency program you will see that residents come from a wide variety of medical schools both in terms of "ranking" and geography. USMLE scores are meant to normalize students from different schools and away rotations, AOA, LOR, and research are more important as well.

Choosing a medical school should be a cost vs. benefit analysis and is subjective so only you can do this. Personally, I would choose a good state school anyday over a private school if it meant I would be saving half a million dollars in the long run. Additionally, it's nice to be close to home during medical school as you have a better support system. On the other hand, there's a lot to be said living in a cool city for 4 years. Hope this helps.

Best of luck and congrats!

I would argue that reputation of medical is very important in matching into competitive specialties such as ortho. Nothing replaces doing well in your course/rotations and getting a great board score, no matter the reputation of your school. However, holding those things equal, you would be better off going to a bigger name program. Having gone to a "top ten med school" with top tier ortho program, I know they definitely use med school reputation as an important criteria for selecting candidates. Connections can make your life alot easier as well. Its not all about the pedigree, but in some ways it is. In the end, you should make your decision taking all factors into account, including personal reasons.

If you're a Georgia resident and able to pay the super cheap tuition to stay in-state, I would go with that, unless you really want to leave the south. With a good academic performance at MCG, you can go anywhere for ortho.

Probably won't help you with matching based on the name, but Northwestern has a much higher regarded ortho program and as such will likely offer better connections. Not too mention that Chicago is a tough area to break into if you don't rotate there or go to school there.