Choosing a career within medicine: do the style and structure of medical schools make a difference?

Thirty people close to graduation from each of the medical schools at McMaster University (MU), Rijksuniversiteit Limburg (RL), Tufts University (TU) and the University of Edinburgh (UE) were interviewed about their future career choices. Few of them recognized features of the medical programmes as influences on their choices, except for the research experience available to some students in an Honours year in Edinburgh and during electives in RL. For all groups, having done research at any time was associated with plans to do research in the future. Differences in other aspects of their development as physicians were found to be associated more often with whether the medical school had post-secondary education prerequisities for admission (MU, TU) or not (RL, UE), than with whether the programmes used traditional education methods (TU, UE) or not (MU, RL).