University of Massachusetts Worcester MA Review

The University of Massachusetts Medical School's students are all from Massachusetts. Hopefully there will be information in this review that helps you make a decision if you are out of state.

Why Choose UMMS:

There are many reasons but as one doctor said, “I’ll give you 30,000 reasons.” That’s right. I didn’t put an extra 0 in that number. The cost of Tufts is $38,000 and the cost of UMMS is $9,000. That doesn’t include housing – Tufts is in Boston, which is more expensive to live in than Worcester, MA the location of UMMS. That doesn’t include anything but walking through the door and for most students this money is taken out in loans. As my own doctor said, “I should have chosen UMMS but I chose Boston University and every day the ticking of the interest was in my head.”

In my daughter’s fourth year she shared a three bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood for $300 a month! That same apartment in Boston would be $3,000.

General Information about UMMS:

It is a small school. There were 100 first year medical students at UMMS with an average age of 25. I was very impressed to meet parents of students who went to Ivy League Universities and turned down acceptances to UPenn and Harvard. I met students who went to Harvard, Brown and Tufts and chose UMMS.

In addition to the School of Medicine, the University of Massachusetts’ Worcester campus houses the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, the Graduate School of Nursing and a growing research enterprise, which I will talk about below.


The rankings:

Many University administrators really dislike US News and World Reports rankings. In any case they are important to some. What took me a long time to realize was the difference between a Research University and a Primary Care University. Simply put, a Research University trains its doctors to be specialists and do research. When my daughter first went almost five years ago. Harvard ranks #1 and UMMS ranks #48 in Primary Care. Tufts ranked #43. (The difference of a 5 point ranking did not in my opinion equal a difference of $30,000.) Just as a point of interest I never told, hinted or in any way gave my daughter any indication of where to go to medical school.

UMMS ranks #4 for Primary Care. They are a well-known Medical School for turning out highly skilled-trained Primary Care Physicians. What is a Primary Care Physician you ask? It is your internist, for example. They are not surgeons. They have a private practice and refer their patients to specialists. At one point in UMMS’s history a huge majority of students went into general medicine. That was a concern of my daughter’s because that wasn’t what she was interested in. Now more than ½ of the students specialize so she wasn't an outlyer.

The campus:

Recently a 21 million-dollar research facility was built. The donors are a couple from Massachusetts who don’t have a huge connection to UMMS but they know the work that the Chancellor and Dean, Dr. Aaron Lazare, has done over his 20 year career at UMMS and wanted this building built at UMMS. Unlike most, this gorgeous building is not named for the donors. It is named for the Dean. It is the Aaron Lazare Medical Research Building and I have no doubt this building will catapult UMMS’s research ranking The donors expect the researchers at this facility to find the cure for cancer!

There are two campuses. One is part of the University hospital on the same campus and the other is an older hospital, UMass Memorial Health Care, which is in downtown Worcester.

This is not a Boston school but it is a city school with just a few trees and a bit of grass.

The classrooms:

Because this is a small school, there are not a lot of classrooms. We were in one for the orientation. It was tiered and sat about 100 people. It was very comfortable with carpeting on the floor. In the first year the 100 students spend the whole day together – 8:00am – 5:00pm except for lunch and when they break up into small groups of 10 and when they have lab.

There are a few labs. The students broke into groups of 4 and they will be with this group for 2 years. In the first weeks of medical school each group of 4 had their own cadavers.

In the one building that holds the classroom and is attached to the hospital are a cafeteria and a small bookstore. The students don’t have books. Really they don’t. They take notes and have handouts. The bookstore has a lot of sweatshirts, t-shirts, some candy and medical supplies like stethoscopes.

What else is around:

Panera Bread is around the corner from my daughter as is the gym she joined. There are many hotels and other colleges in Worcester. It is not too far from Sturbridge and Tanglewood and close enough to Boston to go in for the day.

And

If a parent or parents have moved out of the state you will need to prove you went to high school in MA. or certify legal residency and it has to be for 5 years.

“On October 2, 2006, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute awarded The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2006 to the University of Massachusetts Medical School's Craig C. Mello, PhD, and his colleague Andrew Fire, PhD, of Stanford University, for their discoveries related to RNA interference.”

My daughter is now finishing her first year as a surgical intern at the University of Southern California. She loved UMass and still compares USC with UMass's procedures.

Jo's Viewpoint

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