<p>Interviewing for residency wasn’t exactly wonderful (and the waiting period between now and match day will be even less wonderful), but it was far from the worst part of medical school. As exhausted as I was when I finished interviews, I had a lot of fun as well.</p>
<p>Gosh! The degree of difficulty seems to go up exponentially from college entrance to residency match. Hope, now you are all in cruise control. 8-)</p>
<p>Congrats to you all for completing the interview rounds and here’s wishing you good luck to match at your top choice! </p>
<p>Your posts have been enormously educational for parents of MS2s and 3s.</p>
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Yeah. Well I think they are all bug-eating nuts (to use medical terminology).</p>
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You said a mouthful there, Big Guy.</p>
<p>Reminder to everyone: rank lists are due on 2/22!</p>
<p>I’ve made a few changes to my rank list over the past couple of weeks. Don’t plan on making any more over the next few days. It’s time to sit tight. Less than a month until the Match!</p>
<p>I think I’m done with my list and will just let it sit until Wednesday. I’m lucky/cursed that I would LOVE to go to all of the places that I’ve ranked in my top 4. This is lucky in that it maximizes the chance that I will love where I go for residency, but it has made figuring out the top of my rank list really difficult.</p>
<p>One important realization that I had is that my list is NOTHING like I thought it would be before interviews started. And it’s even changed slightly in the weeks since interviews ended.</p>
<p>How many department members interviewed you in each interview? Were there standard canned questions asked during the interviews? Did they make notes of your responses or is the ranking based on mostly overall feel of the candidate? </p>
<p>It would be interesting to understand how the Program Directors rank all the candidates their department interviews.</p>
<p>If we knew how the program directors went about ranking all of us, this entire process would be a lot easier on the students. As it is, we know very little about that process, and I suspect that it differs significantly by specialty and program.</p>
<p>As for number of interviews at each program, for me it varied between one and three. Sometimes people took notes as I was talking, other times they didn’t. I actually got very few canned questions, I think. Everyone told me to expect to get 1) “Why internal medicine”, and 2) “why us” at every interview, and I didn’t get those as much. I actually don’t think anyone asked me why I wanted to go into internal medicine. Maybe it’s because I think my application was pretty heavy on why I wanted to go into internal medicine.</p>
<p>I felt like the vast majority of my interviewers had read my application and picked out specific things they wanted to talk about rather than ask the same questions to every applicant.</p>
<p>1-2 interviewers at my internal medicine prelim/transitional year interviews.</p>
<p>2-6 interviewers at my radiology interviews (on average 3-4 interviews per interview day).</p>
<p>The questions ranged from “tell me about activity X,” “why radiology,” “what do you do for fun” to “tell me about a situation where you didn’t get along with your resident,” “tell me about your heroes,” “tell me about an interesting patient.” </p>
<p>Occasionally, you’ll run into an interviewer who’s determined to make you sweat a little (a lot of “if you could be a kitchen utensil, what would you be” questions). But, those interviewers are rare. I’d say maybe 5% of my interviewers were like that. </p>
<p>Most interviewers did not make notes during the interview (although I suspected they wrote their impressions in between interviews). A few interviewers took notes or had a standard checklist/form that they filled out during the interview.</p>
<p>My son finished his list for anesthesiology. As I mentioned elsewhere, the big question was how to rank the 3 year programs where he have to go somewhere else for the first internal medicine year. Many programs have about 10 4 year slots and 10 three year slots.</p>
<p>He’d really like to get in somewhere for 4 years. However, in the end, he decided that his top two programs were such that he rated the 4 and 3 year programs at the top. So the top of his list reads:
- Best program, 4 year.
- Best program, 3 year.
- Second best program, 4 year.
- Second best program, 3 year.<br>
- Third best program 4 year (the place has no 3 year). </p>
<p>I think he made the right choice. It doesn’t seem so bad to go somewhere for 1 year of internal medicine if you then get to got to the place of your choice for your anesthesiology training.</p>
<p>When I see the match statistics for 2011 for one of the areas, it appears that the average # applications are ~50. This number seems ridiculously huge! I can’t imagine being interviewed at so many places. I guess it would probably mean that an applicant who applies to 50 places doesn’t really personally interview at all these spots… or do they?</p>
<p>I don’t think it would be humanly possible to do 50 interviews. There’s not a 100% success rate for interviews (for most people), so almost everyone intentionally applies to more places than they want to do interviews. If the person gets more interview invitations than that can do/want to do, they cancel some interviews.</p>
<p>I know one person applying in a very competitive field last year who told me that he applied to 60 programs in the hopes of getting 10-12 interviews.</p>
<p>:confused: Shoot me now.</p>
<p>In general, the more competitive the field, the more places you have to apply to. On average, radiology, derm, etc. applicants apply to ~40-45 programs but family medicine, internal medicine, peds, etc. applicants apply to 10-13 programs. There is a huge variability between different specialties due to the difference in competitiveness.</p>
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<p>Of course not. You certainly aren’t guaranteed an interview just for applying. Most places I interviewed at received 400-900 applications for 25-100 interview spots (which are used to fill 3-13 seats). This is for radiology.</p>
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<p>This wasn’t even a consideration for me. Only 10% of the radiology programs I interviewed at even had the prelim year built-in. Secondly, I only applied to home and where I am now for my prelim years so that regardless of where I match for radiology, I won’t have to move too much for my prelim year.</p>
<p>If I remember correctly, last year Mount Sinai’s general surgery residency program received something like 900 applications for about 60 interview spots to fill a class of 6. I only know this because at the interview day, one of the slides in the welcome presentation had the statistics. </p>
<p>General surgery is probably the least competitive of all the surgical specialties (general surgery, orthopedics, urology, neurosurgery, and ENT), and it’s less competitive than radiology or derm. I think a 100:10:1 ratio of applications:interviews:spots is about right for general surgery, and certainly within the correct order of magnitude.</p>
<p>Thanks, folks! This certainly seems to be a daunting task. Kudos to you all for having completed this process. Three more weeks to go for the Match Day. Best of luck to you all for getting into your top choices. Please keep informing us where you match.</p>
<p>S finalized his rank list yesterday. In the end he was offered 18 interviews from 30 applications. He ended up taking 13 interviews, cancelled his last three and two were on dates that conflicted with interviews at better /more highly regarded programs. All in all his travel to interviews cost him a little more than seven thousand dollars for those of you still looking forward to this. ;)</p>
<p>He ranked 12 programs and did not rank one of the places where he interviewed because he decided that there was no way he wanted to spend the next 5-7 years there after his visit.</p>
<p>Needless to say the “pucker factor” is pretty high right now. :(</p>
<p>Eadad, I recall that your DS is applying to general surgery, right? Thirty apps sounds not too bad. I was checking one of the ROAD specialties and was surprised that the average number of applications were 50, which means there must be folks applying to ~60 places. Good luck to your DS! Let us know where he goes.</p>
<p>Despite being daunting, this process is so exciting that I am tempted to visit DS’s med school on Match day just to partake in the process. Not sure if they allow parents of MS2s. How awesome it must feel to embark on your future as an MD after the exacting four years! I suspect all the Moms will be crying.</p>
<p>And the rank list is officially closed. Nothing to do now except wait.</p>