Admission Committees for Clinical PhD

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BurgeoningPhD2

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Hi StudentDocs,

I know there are some experts on this forum, please reply if you have experience. My question is, how long does it take for student selection committees to review applications for clinical PhD programs? Can anybody describe the process? If the deadline to apply to a program is December 1st, what is the process of review and approximately how long does it take to select students for interviews? Suppose the deadline is Dec. 1st, and the interview is in February, approximately at what date would the committee have made up their mind to invite you for an interview.

Burge

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Each school is different, some will put it together this week and some will not be done until the end of January.
 
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Agreed, it's really going to vary significantly from program to program, and even perhaps from professor to professor. I'd imagine it'd be a minimum of a few weeks after the application deadline before any notifications go out, but beyond that, it's tough to say.
 
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Look at the 2013-14 Interview thread to get an idea of when schools have made decisions in the past
 
It can vary very much year to year within a program as well. I think most traditional programs have a new admissions committee chair each year and faculty sometimes mix things up. I know my program jumped around from early interview dates (mine was in late January) to late (late Feb, early March) depending on the admissions committee chair. However, one consistent practice was that invites/phone calls go out very soon after the faculty review applicants. Once its decided no one waited to long to get in contact with applicants.
 
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As others have said, it will vary. The trend seems to be scheduling earlier interview dates (more at the end of January than there used to be) which would also mean earlier notification dates, but it will change by program. My program typically issues invites in early January after we have all come back from break. We'd like to invite earlier but it takes awhile to compile all of the applications and figure out who is applying to which faculty member, and then for that faculty member to review them all. The holiday break in there doesn't make things any easier.
 
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Our deadline is December 1st in large part because it typically takes the admissions office at least a month to scan in all of the documents and make them accessible to faculty. Thus, I plan on distributing spreadsheets to our faculty around January 1st with information of the applicants and assigning each faculty member to review two of the files (including any students that appear to be a research match with that faculty member). We will then meet sometime in mid-January to discuss the results of our review and to come up with our interview list. We will likely extend interview offers in late January for an interview date in early March.
 
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