However, you are mostly rated on how much you know, how confident you are and your social skills. So if you did really well in the pre clinical years and are not socially inept then you’ll probably get good evaluations.
But it’s a marathon. It’s an unbelievable amount of information you have to memorize and in the beginning it’s hard to stay motivated when you can’t see it’s direct relevance.
So overall I’d say it’s fairly meritocratic. If you can memorize things well and are social then you’ll do well barring any exceptional circumstances.
Or maybe they're also a tech enthusiast in their spare time!
It is nice to have a greater breadth of backgrounds. The overall quality of comments can only improve.
Edit: maybe someone that downvoted this could help me understand what is disagreeable about this comment?
Edit: it is hard-enough as is for people who deal with abuse to openly talk about it. It would be good to give people the benefit of the doubt rather than accuse them of doing something wrong. Reality is not like that though, and many people living with ill will or abuse are often seen as "must have done something" to be experiencing that.
I'm not sure why you act as if I am attacking you. Like I said I wasn't the one to downvote you, and I only offered a possible explanation for that downvote in response to a question that you asked. I'm sorry you were abused at some point and that wasn't your fault. But it sounds like that was in the past. Yet you are immediately taking a victim role in this conversation, and also in your replies to others in this thread. If you feel like people are out to get you all the time then chances are you are letting your past experiences colour your perceptions too much.
By the way I hope you are wrong in your judgement here regarding opportunity, but I fear that you are right.
The idea that extreme bullying is anything other than a normal feature of bureaucratic organisations with no competition is farcical. It’s like believing in fairness or the tooth fairy.
IIRC the surgery fellowship (8 years after graduating undergrad, 4 years after med school graduation) application process gives a list of 10 cities (hospitals) which the intern is interviewing and applying for. They are allowed to rank their top three cities from this list, but there is no guarantee. They will travel to all ten cities and interview at all the programs.
Medicine is great for someone who wants to be in training until they are mid 30s - and that’s assuming you go directly to med school from undergrad.
Medical schools admit a variable number of students each year although they aim to have a specific number. It’s difficult to switch medical schools because Med school curricula are very different from program to program. And also there’s just no standard mechanism for switching, you’d just have to schmooze some of the higher up administrators. Med schools don’t really get any advantage by taking in transfers unless they had a mass exodus of students and needed the money. So there’s little incentive for administrators to even bother with transfers. In residency you want all your positions filled so you can keep the funding and have enough staffing so if a position opens you want to fill it ASAP.
Not finishing a degree at one school suggests you're more likely to not finish it at the next school.
Why would schools take that risk when they can choose from 4,999 other applicants instead.
So I’d only recommend going to medical school if you’re a top student who can get scholarships (so you don’t have much debt) and so you have some control over where you go (because you’ll be competitive for most programs). But even so, I went to a top Med school which was my first choice and I still ended up hating it. You’ll never know what program/city you’ll like until you try it but once you start it’s very difficult to change Med schools or residency programs in general.