@PVNova, do you know what specialties your son is interested in? It’s really hard to know this early on in the game in high school since he doesn’t have much experience to go off of. Quite honestly, most students change their mind entirely on the specialty they wish to go for from the 1st year to the last year. Even in residency, there are those who change their mind and decide to subspecialize. For example, if he was interested in Gastroenterology, he would apply for an Internal Medicine residency first in med school, and then apply for a GI fellowship during residency to subspecialize (subspecialize means you do a fellowship after an initial residency). Or if he decided he liked working with children initially, he could do a Pediatrics residency and then subspecialize in one of the organ systems (GI, Cardiology, Hematology/Oncology, Pulmonary, etc.). Even if he didn’t want to do a Pediatric residency, he could still work with children as other residency specialties – Derm, Ophtho, Anesthesiology, Radiology, ENT, Neurology, etc. have pediatric fellowships that can be done after the initial residency is completed. There are a lot of combinations and options.
Most medical schools have you rotate through the required clerkships in the third year of medical school as an accreditation requirement: Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Surgery, Obstetrics & Gynecology, Family Medicine, Neurology, and Psychiatry. Medical students apply during their last year of medical school for residency programs.
The name of your medical school isn’t everything, and that alone won’t be enough if you’re interested in a residency specialty that happens to be competitive. You’ll still need good grades and clerkship grades, good board scores, and research, but the main difference among schools is usually the amount of resources they have for their students readily available on site – whether that’s for board preparation, research involvement, the specific hospitals they rotate at in the third year which are usually led by academic clinical faculty who write letters of recommendation, etc. It doesn’t mean that if you have a big name medical school, you can get to any residency you want, if you don’t have the scores & grades, but med schools like you mentioned Case, Northwestern, etc. tend to have those extra resources readily available – either because it’s part of the infrastructure, or they’re located in a city in which those things are readily available. And thus, because of that, those programs can be relatively more competitive and their medical schools tend to run more expensive since they happen to be private med schools. That being said there are also excellent public state schools that are cheaper and have more opportunities than even some private medical schools. It all depends what you’re comparing.
Are there any programs he’s thinking of specifically? I think a good start would be getting the Medical School Admissions Requirements book, and flipping thru and looking at their mission statements. You can tell a lot based on that the philosophy of the medical school. I think the best thing to do is find a BS/MD program that is the right “fit”.
This is a good start to stratify medical schools based on what you’re looking for: https://www.aamc.org/students/applying/370872/35questions.html