Hi everyone,
I’m currently applying to doctoral programs in the biomedical sciences and have been lucky enough to get a few interview invites. Does anyone know how many interviewees at these events are typically given admissions offers?
Thanks!
It varies very widely by school and program. In my program, we usually admitted about half the students we interviewed. I’m imagining most programs probably extend offers to between 30 and 70 percent of their interviewees; that’s a guess, but it’s based on the fact that interviewing is pretty time-intensive and costly and it doesn’t make sense to invite a whole bunch of students who have no chance of admission.
When you get invited to doctoral programs, is a university visit invite equal to an interview? I’ve been invited to visit to GT already, is that the interview I’ve been invited to even though it doesn’t say it’s an interview?
I responded to your other thread too, but most likely in your case it is an interview. Many doctoral programs are a bit unclear about what interviews are, but if the letter doesn’t say you’ve been admitted to the program and is just inviting you to “visit,” it’s an interview. It’s still a visit - it’s as much a chance for you to figure out if you would like to attend that program as it is for them to evaluate whether or not they want you, and usually the admission rate among invited interviewees is something like 40-50%, I’d wager. (At my program it was about 50%.) At this point they are trying to evaluate how well you’d fit into the department and into a specific PI’s lab, as well as how much you know about research and how passionate you truly are about the field.
Sometimes you’ll still get a separate acceptance letter after the invite letter and before the visit. That happened to my kid last year.