November is probably getting a little late. Anything between 9/15 and Dean’s letters 10/01 is probably on equal ground. Once we have Dean’s letters with their corroborating or not corroborating descriptions of reasons for delays or failures, things begin to change. If you are a superstar, most places will make room to interview you all the way to the end. If you are more in the middle, it becomes more difficult once we assume most of the data is in and we have decided where to draw the line based on the applicant pool and our capacity to see people. We decide about how many people we can see, and yes we do get some cancelations so some applicants are left hanging until that happens, but the people who are “wait listed” begin to say “no thank you” the closer to the end the process becomes. Applicants run out of time and money so we understand this. The “bar” for invites tends to creep up with time as we face the same interview fatigue that applicants are faced with. It is a bit of a game of chicken on our end. If we invite all that we can handle, we will be faced with “why are we seeing this person” when better applicants are coming in. If we hold off on to many slots, there is anxiety about getting enough to fill.
Holding large numbers on a wait list is cruel and doesn’t let people plan their lives. Applicants holding 20+ interviews they can’t possibly go to is the parallel sin as it closes out interviews for the less fortunate. If you are a good applicant, please decide how many programs you need to see to make up your mind and bow out early. My coordinator wants to kill applicants who cancel after she has arranged for a full day of interviews, so do not cancel last minute. Trust me she knows about everyone in the business and I have no control over her communication network or her ire. She is the nicest person in the world, but this is the one thing that she has lost tolerance for.
We will try and keep our wait lists short if you keep your end by doing this. If you get more than 8 interviews, you are very likely to be fine. If you don’t, go to all you get. If you don’t match in your top 5 or 6, you are unlikely to match in your top 20 in most cases. We don’t interview applicants we don’t want to match.
