University of California-San Francisco Rankings by Salary Score™

Overrated. Most educators taught well in first two years, but good luck when you hit the clinical rotations—You are expected to know and perform—sink or swim because you are being evaluated all the time. Once a while you might get lucky to get a nice (overworked) resident who will teach you a thing or two, but most of time, you better learn on your own or pick up what you can from your competitive classmates on your rotation. Attendings may give a didactic session here and there as time allows, but you will... Read More rarely get one-on-one preceptor teaching to help you learn what you don’t know. Perhaps what I am describing is not atypical of all medical school education, but be fully warned that there is no standardization of clinical experiences here and your grades on the clinical rotations will highly depend on how gracious or passively aggressively your attending and senior resident is. This is one of the few medical schools that require a sub-internship rotation in internal/family medicine for graduation, and if you don’t pass, you will probably need to say bye-bye to your medical degree and be stuck with 3-4 years of med school debt. They are very proud of their « high » standards and « exceptional «  clinical training. I saw many people comment on financial issues. While it’s true that rent is high on average in SF, you can sometimes find cheap places to rent due to rent control and if you are flexible enough. The biggest plus is that there is cheap and good produce and food. What’s more unbearable is the windy, chilly, gloomy weather all the time in the city. While the tuition may be cheaper than a private school, you will not get much if any in terms of grants or scholarships. Unlike my undergrad where there is free unlimited transcript ordering and printing for students, you will be paying $15 per transcript ordered and who knows how much per page printed here now. You can definitely tell that they are not financially as strong as private schools. Just look up the David Kessler scandal.

This program is overrated and overpriced. The university jacked up tuition several times, and once at ten times the rate of inflation (36%), during the recession no less. The estimate of costs they gave ended up being doubled by the time I graduated, along with $9,000 in accrued interest by graduation day. The quality of instruction is very average and is too reliant on back-to-back hours of power point presentations, many of which were not well designed. The only lectures I loved were when we had guest lecturers... Read More from the School of Medicine because they gave some real substance and depth that most of the nursing lectures lacked. Beyond lectures, there were few other learning modalities available, and I never once got a rotation in my chosen specialty registered with the school. Their excuse was that the rotations are scarce and difficult to come by. I did get an interesting opportunty to participate in a hospital-based research project, but that was limited to looking at data online and writing a class paper based on the results. I had richer research experiences as an undergraduate. The statistics classes were at a lower level than I had as an undergraduate at Berkeley because the nursing students in the class could not grasp the most basic concepts. The exams for that class were all an easy 100% because they had to dumb everything down. I also found the discussion sections uninteresting because it became very clear that they were not interested in any real debate or differing opinions. I had never heard the expression “Nurses eat their young” until I was in nursing school. I had several experiences of inappropriate behavior by faculty including a dressing down in front of a patient, her family, and several other nursing students, because my discharge was “taking too long.” I was looking into the medication error I had discovered and had been on the phone with the pharmacy to get it corrected. She apologized afterward for being wrong, but this type of experience was not isolated. Nursing is already a stressful endeavor so an education program should do more to create a supportive learning environment. I spent three months working on writing my thesis and I waited a month to get their written response back. It scored well, but the faculy reviewers each gave me one sentence about it. Even seven years later, I see this program as an overpriced heap of disappointment.