UPenn has PhD studies in Cell and Molecular Biology, and in Genetics, as does the Penn Medicine Biomedical Graduate Studies Program. Harvard, Columbia, NYU, Pitt, and other institutions also offer various graduate biomedical programs at both their Med Schools and at their Universities. What are the differences in the experience/curriculum of pursuing the PhD at a Medical School vs. a University if they both offer the same areas of study?
I’d imagine the relative importance of a clinical component is likely a possible difference here, but you’d have to look at each case individually I fear.
There aren’t any clinical duties for PhD candidates that I know of. On the surface both types of programs seem the same from a curricular point of view.
I didn’t necessarily mean clinical in the sense where the student would be expected to treat patients. I meant more in the sense that the faculty in a medical school have easier access to a clinical setting and their research is therefore more likely to skew in a direction that may include a clinical trial or similar type of activity.
Ultimately, even if the formal requirements are the same, the difference in faculty in two programs will dictate the difference in the respective PhD programs.
The curriculum doesn’t necessarily have to be very different. The best way to find this out is to actually examine the curricula of the different programs you are considering. For example, the coordinated doctoral programs at Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia are taught primarily by PhDs, not by medical school faculty. They just happen to be PhDs with appointments at the med school (although some have dual appointments or are in other departments). The coursework isn’t all that different than coursework you’d take if you were a, say, microbiology and immunology student not at the med school.
The experience is likely to be quite different, though. I went to the Columbia University Medical Center as a PhD student, and my program was formally administered by GSAS but was actually housed and mostly taught by the School of Public Health, right next door, similar to how the coordinated biomedical sciences programs are administered. You’ll spend most of your time at the medical center complex, which for many universities is actually physically removed from the ‘main campus’ Columbia’s medical center is over 40 blocks north of the main campus on 116th St, in a completely different neighborhood. Your research will be done in medical laboratories and/or in the hospital, and you may spend considerable amounts of time in the hospital labs. The hospital is actually connected to the medical school - you can walk directly from one to the next.
Student life in the medical center complex is very different than student life on the main campus - we had our own student groups and organizations, our own graduate student governing body, and didn’t interact much with the graduate students on the main campus unless we wanted to. (We even had an orchestra.) My program was a little unique in that I had to take classes at the main campus as part of my program, but unless your PhD program requires that, you don’t have to go there at all. You can even get your library books delivered to the health sciences library, if you need anything from one of Columbia’s 19 other libraries. The culture is different - most of your grad student friends and colleagues will probably be students within your program and other medically-related programs, like the med and dental students, nutrition, public health, nursing, occupational and physical therapy, etc. I knew more OT students than I knew English literature students, for example. You pick up bits and pieces and tidbits about other medical/health sciences fields from your friends and colleagues.
Living in Washington Heights around the corner from CUMC is very different from living in Morningside Heights, nearby the main campus. I lived in both neighborhoods - I pretty literally split my PhD right down the middle, 3 years in Wash Heights, 3 years in Morningside Heights - and both have their pros and cons. (Washington Heights is certainly cheaper!)
You should pick whichever program is best for your career goals and research interests. But remember that PhD programs are pretty flexible. So in most cases, even if you chose to do a PhD that was housed on the more traditional side of the university, it’d probably be very possible for you to take a lot of classes at the medical center and do your research up there, and even have a secondary (or primary) advisor housed in one of the medical center departments. The reverse is probably also true - if you’re a student in one of the coordinated biomedical sciences PhD programs, you can still take classes at main campus as you please and have an advisor in the regular biology department. And any medical center student in a PhD program is still in GSAS, and could participate in main campus life as much or as little as they wanted to - you could even choose to live in Morningside Heights, if you wanted to for some reason.
I appreciate your comprehensive reply!
It’s clear from your response that there’s so much to navigate beyond the research component when selecting a site for PhD studies. In your experience/opinion, is one better served for prospects in industry with a degree from Medical School or a university’s graduate program? And conversely, is one better served acquiring the degree from a school’s graduate program with the goal of being a professor at a University?
For industry, university vs. medical school doesn’t really matter. What matters is your university’s and department’s reputation within the industry. I do some hiring for my team and we do look at that, and it matters. (And your university’s and/or department’s reputation within industry might be different than its reputation within academia.)
Same thing for academia. It doesn’t really matter what unit of the university your PhD comes from. What matters is the placement rate and reputation your program has within academia. Some PhD programs housed in medical schools have histories of placing their graduates really well within academic positions. However, I will say one of the things you want to poke at is what kind of academic position you want to end up in, and whether your program places there. If you feel very strong about working in, say, a traditional biology department and teaching undergrads as well as master’s and doctoral students, make sure your program places people in those kinds of positions or that there is at least a chance of you ending up in that kind of place. Some fields (like immunology) and types of programs (like some of those housed in med schools) may much more often place their graduates in positions at other medical schools/centers, positions that are typically much more heavily research and only teach graduate/doctoral students.
The research component is the most important part, of course. But yes, you should consider many other factors when choosing your program, and where your PhD can take you in your career is one of the most important of those.
If you are at a campus without undergraduate students, you won’t be required to work as a teaching assistant.
There are also lifestyle differences – do you want to attend any sports events? (Not that there is much time available for that kind of thing.) The day-to-day life on a campus with undergrads of every major is much different than being at a campus that only consists of graduate science and medical students.
That’s not necessarily true. It does reduce the likelihood by a fair bit, but you might be asked or required to TA for the first- and/or second-year graduate courses once you are a more advanced student. Lots of the second-year master’s students and the doctoral students in my program, which had no undergrads, were required to TA for first-year master’s courses for their assistantships.