Hey everyone! I hope everyone is capturing their visions and dreams… I was offered interviews at U of Iowa, Rosalind Franklin/Chicago Medical School, Vanderbilt, and St. Louis U, and U of Wisconsin. Does anyone have any information about these Medical schools? thank you 
I have a buddy who did his residency at Vanderbilt-- he actually didn’t match anywhere he wanted to go and got the Vanderbilt slot in the “scramble”. He loved it-- said the training in psychiatry is awesome, interesting and diverse patient load, and recommended to me.
Well, for Rosalind Franklin in Chicago keep two things in mind: A) It’s actually about an hour north of downtown Chicago in the northern suburbs, with a longer commute if you’re driving during rush hour traffic, and B) All of your 3rd/4th year rotations will basically be away rotations, since they lack a hospital of their own. They do have agreements in place with various hospitals in the Chicagoland area though. Some people don’t like the fact that you don’t really get settled into one system where you get to know the system very well and many of the people who work there, while others appreciate the fact that you do see a variety of different systems and approaches to different things.
My wife interviewed at U of Wisconsin last year when she was applying for her residency. She liked the program quite a bit, and the people there were among the friendliest as far as truly personalized letters and emails throughout the process. That said, in Madison you end up with a rather homogenous patient population, which ended up being too big of a strike for her to rank them too highly. Other than that though, she really liked everything about the school and the IM program that she was looking into.
I saw St. Louis U in a very literal “saw it while driving by a few times” sense when I went down to St. Louis with my wife last year for her interview at Wash U. I had heard plenty of bad things about St. Louis, but the truth is that the area where you find St. Louis U and the Barnes-Jewish hospital system for Wash U is actually quite nice. We were both surprised and impressed enough by the area that St. Louis suddenly became an acceptable city to thing about moving to after all. I can’t really say anything specific about St. Louis U though, other than to say that the university campus looked quite nice.
St. Louis is a nice city in many ways, but it is around #3 for crime. I guess that’s a good thing in one sense, that when you do your ER rotations you’ll get to see lots of bullet and knife wounds.
My understanding is that in clinical rotations at UW for med school you’ll do quite a few away rotations, often in rural Wisconsin. So the patient population may be a little different, though not, probably, traditionally urban.