Question 6: What is the best medical school?

Salt shaker alert on this one, my opinion is certainly not the only one.

I personally do not think there is one best medical school in the USA or anywhere, rather that there is a best medical school for you. The problem with saying who is better than who is the question of how to rank them. There are probably a half dozen legitimate ways to rank medical schools on the web, the most popular of them being the two used by USA Today. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Washington University Saint Louis are ranked tops in this list. The problem arises because everyone is not looking for the same things in a medical school. For example, I would argue that, if you polled 100 random strangers that are not related to the medical field in any way, you would find that Johns Hopkins is considered to be more prestigious than Harvard, and that WashU is probably not even in the top 10. On the other hand, let us just consider the average opinion of residency directors. Harvard and JH continue to stand at the top, but other schools further down the list reorient themselves. What about research dollars? Then the question arises about who's research dollars, and do we consider the total amount, or the amount per researcher at a specific school? More reorientation. This list would be totally useless to someone not interested in research or maybe even academic medicine. There's another list for those interest in care only. And it just gets more and more complicated.

This is why I say that there isn't just one top medical school, it varies from person to person. Some people might want to practice in California and thus UCLA or Stanford might top their list, since people tend to do residency and practice in the region that they went to medical school (on average). Perhaps someone absolutely hates the cold, and so only apply to medical school in the South. I strongly encourage that, rather than just taking ranking or prestige alone into account, create a list of priorities, and allow yourself to make a decision based on your interview experience and how the school "felt" to you. Plenty of people turn down Top 10 schools to go to other schools, and not just for financial reasons. They felt that they fit better, or that a different school had a teaching style or atmosphere that was better suited to their personality. I would also suggest not choosing a "top school" or trying to rank your schools until you have been accepted. Otherwise, all of your carefully made plans might be thrown in disarray, depending on admission decisions. That's a lot of emotional effort spent on something you have very little control over.