Simple question... Is it better to interview early in the cycle or later? Earlier has its obvious benefits of being seen first but is there any advantage to interviewing later where you might be remembered more during rank time? Thanks.

Simple question... Is it better to interview early in the cycle or later? Earlier has its obvious benefits of being seen first but is there any advantage to interviewing later where you might be remembered more during rank time? Thanks.

Maybe someone else can back me up, or BKN himself (was it you that posted this?), but as I recall it was posted on here that at least one program looked at this questions and found that there was no correlation between interview time and matching with their program.

Maybe someone else can back me up, or BKN himself (was it you that posted this?), but as I recall it was posted on here that at least one program looked at this questions and found that there was no correlation between interview time and matching with their program.

Yeah, I remember that too. You won't increase your chances of matching by being the freshest face in their mind. That said, here is some personal advice on interview scheduling:

1) If possible, it may be nice to schedule early one or two interviews that are not at the top of your pre-interview list to get your feet wet. This can kind of help to get the kinks out.

2) Try to schedule your top programs in the middle. A lot of us tend to interview best in the middle of our interviews b/c we're at that perfect balance where we are comfortable interviewing but not yet burned out like we may be at the end of our interview trails.

3) Realize ahead of time that interviews towards the end of your season become prime candidates for cancellations as motivation and money start to dwindle for you. If you're already happy with your top 10 programs it becomes hard to convince yourself to do an interview at a place you're not so sure about. I started off with 18 interviews and cancelled 8 of them. 6 of my cancellations were for interviews in January.

4) Rules 1-3 are full of exceptions and are obviously based on the assumption that your pre-interview rank list will be somewhat simialr to your final rank list. This assumption is often quite wrong.

5) Schedule interviews in geographic circuits if you can but don't kill yourself. I did 3 interviews in four days, and was originally scheduled to do 4 in 4 days before I cancelled one. They were all about 2 hrs apart, so the travel wasn't that bad, but I was really dragging by the last one.

Maybe someone else can back me up, or BKN himself (was it you that posted this?), but as I recall it was posted on here that at least one program looked at this questions and found that there was no correlation between interview time and matching with their program.

Yeah, that was me. It surprised me too. I thought that it was easier to remember the latest faces. Of course given how the interview goes, it could cut both ways.:cool: