 Does it matter where you go to medical school? In this video, I'm going to give you four things to consider before you're making your ultimate choice on where you start your training to become a doctor. Let's get to it after this intro. All right, guys, what is going on in the lecture of an MD journey, helping you succeed on your journey with less stress. Today, we are going to talk about how to choose your ultimate destination when it comes to medical school and whether it actually matters. So I'm going to give you four things and they're going to be personal to every single person so there's no one right or wrong way. I'm just going to give you things to consider to help you make your final decision. So let's get into it. Now, the first thing you should consider for medical school is price. Now, typical debt after four years of med school is if anywhere from $180 to $200,000 depending on when you're watching this video. And that's before interest starts kicking in which a lot of it starts to cure during residency. So you can easily be $300,000, $400,000 in that hole when you actually are done paying you off your med school loans. So it does matter which school you select because two schools with a roughly similar caliber or reputations can have a much drastic difference in price tag. And just to give you an example, there's an Ivy League school out there. A lot of you people respect it and it's an amazing education but it does cost $63,000 roughly as making this video per year into wish note loan. That doesn't include cost of living or the cost of a room and board. So $63,000 can come out to basically $250,000 over four years compared to other places such as the institution where I went to medical school is roughly a little bit more than 20,000. So four years of medical school costing you, you know, give or take about $80 to $90,000 versus $250 for not that difference in terms of caliber, reputation or education, I would say I would pick the latter. Now obviously it's going to depend on your life goals and we're gonna talk about that in a second. Now the price tag is obviously not the only thing you should be considering but when you have to face a difference between an expensive school and a cheaper school and you like both of them equally you probably should go with a cheaper school to make your future financial life a little bit easier. But let's talk about some of the other things you should consider when you're making your final decision on where to go to medical school. The second thing you wanna consider when picking a medical school is board scores. Now like it or hate it, your step one score or your board scores really can determine your life's kind of trajectory. Step one is probably the most important exam you take in the history of your medical career and it really does dictate what kind of physician you can become. So if you have big dreams, you wanna become a dermatologist, a plastic surgeon. Those require really good scores. So if you're deciding between two schools and one clearly has a much better, notice that I emphasize much better compared to the other school you probably should pick the one with a higher board score because that means that their curriculum and their education is helping you do better on the exam. It also means that they likely have smarter students but still look at the board scores because that can give you an idea of what doors of opportunity will be open for you if you also put in the hard work. So look at the board scores, schools publish this all the time and if you see a school with a low score, anything like below a 220, 225 being the average, that's something you really do wanna be hesitant about because the average every year continues to go up and the competitiveness for the competitive specialties and normal specialties continues to also rise. So put yourself in the best position. Look at the price obviously. Look at the step one scores and the step two scores for schools to help yourself when it's time for residency. So the third thing is really what tip people tend to get at the very start, which is look at what your future goals and ambitions are and you may not know them but some of you may have a clear idea of what kind of doctor you wanna be or where you wanna live. So let's break them down one by one. So let's look at what first, what kind of doctor you wanna be. So let's assume that you wanna do some that's really competitive, things like Durham, plastics, radiation oncology, just to name a few, you typically would like to go to a school that has a reputation of matching students into those residency programs. If you wanna go to radiation oncology and you realize your school has never matched anybody to a program in that field, that's probably something to consider. Obviously it's not an end all, you know, matchless school vary from year to year depending on the preferences of that respective class. But you do wanna consider if you have really big aspirations, will that institution keep those doors open for you? Now the second part of it is to think about where you wanna end up geographically as a resident as well as an attending because where you go to medical school may help you get into a certain residency program. So for example, I'm from Texas, me trying to go to an institution outside of the state is really hard because they know that students from Texas like to stay in Texas. So unless I had a tie for family reasons or maybe I went to college in one of the states, it's very hard for me to convince an outside institution aside from my board scores or whatnot that I would want to actually move if you brought me for an interview. So you wanna keep that in consideration. If you wanna move to the West Coast but you have no ties to the West Coast, maybe look to going into medical school in the West Coast, again, considering price as well as future aspirations and board scores. So it keeps geography in mind because where your trajectory may be heading, you may be able to help yourself if you can put yourself in that medical school earlier rather than later. And the last part, guys, is really the most important and that's just your general happiness with if you went to this medical school or if you got accepted to this medical school. How is the location? Are you around family? Are you around friends? Are you around activities that you can do if you're not a dorsy person but you're living in like a flat terrain area it may not be the best for you. But definitely consider everything put together and ask yourself, am I going to be somebody that's gonna remember my medical school experience as a positive or am I gonna remember as just four years of the stepping stone to my medical education? And if you're in the latter guys, you're not taking the right move. You wanna make sure that you enjoy where you're gonna school and you remember the experience that developed you into a better doctor. So I love my medical school because I purposely picked it because I thought it was gonna give me the best chance to enjoy my four years while also developing into a great physician. So make sure you consider your happiness as well as future happiness and then take in the other three things that we talked about which is price, forward scores as well as just your future goals and aspirations. Put them all together and you'll probably have a few leftover choices when it comes to medical school. And I hope that I helped you make the decision a little bit easier. If you guys have more questions or if you just wanna ask me a personal question you can comment down below or email me at themdjourney.com at teamon.com. If you guys have more questions about kind of applying to medical school or medical school in general comment down below and I'll be happy to make a video in the future. And I'm gonna leave it at that guys. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure you hit the like and subscribe button if you haven't already. And thank you so much again for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one. Take care guys.