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I am applying for surgery and after many of my interviews many program directors tell me to "keep in touch". What do they mean by this, and how do I keep in touch without breaking match rules. Thanks
stay in touch
- Thread starter orangedoc
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Email, phone call, letter, text message, telegram, morse code, smoke signal...I could go on.
What match rules are you worried about breaking? Don't ask them where you are on their rank list and you're pretty much in the clear.
Also, please do a search...this question gets asked a lot.
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Valentine's card, Easter card, etc... If you can't figure out what to do and how to "stay in touch" with the pd...
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What they mean by "stay in touch" is "in February, please let us know how highly you will be ranking us".
Come February, you have only two plays:
1. "I will be ranking you #1"
2. "I will be ranking you very highly"
-AT.
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What is better to tell your 2nd and 3rd choices? "I will be ranking you very highly." or "Your program is one of my top 2/top 3 choices for residency."
QofQuimica
Seriously, dude, I think you're overreacting....
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I feel like it's probably better not to say anything, because whatever you say besides "you're my number one ranked program," is going to tell them that they're not your number one ranked program. But I'd be interested to hear other people's opinions about this.
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I went with "will be ranking you highly" because it's more vague. Probably doesn't matter at all but if it makes you (as it did me) feel better, go for it.
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That's pointless. You could try to say something like "you are one of my top 3 choices" or even worse "I will be ranking you very highly", but that won't really make a difference. No program director would hear that statement and think "ooh, maybe this means we'll be her #1 choice". Like I said, you only have 2 plays. "You're my #1" -- or not. The program director knows that you will profess your undying love to your #1 choice, whichever program your #1 choice may be. The program director knows this because applicants exhibit this behavior: universally, applicants will tell their #1 choice "you are my #1 choice" because they think it will induce the program to rank them more highly. (Of course, applicants only do this because everyone else is doing this. Clearly all applicants would be better off if no one professed their love to their respective #1 choices, but this is an unstable equilibrium because any applicant has an incentive to break rank.) The program director also knows that you know that you can (ethically) only profess your undying love to a single program. So when it comes time for you to say something to the program director, she knows that if you do not tell her "you're my #1", then she is not your #1 choice.
So really what you should do is just keep silent. Who cares if the program director says "let's keep in touch", who cares if the program director leaves you a voice mail the day before rank lists are due, etc etc. Sure, this takes cojones -- but you should do this because it is the right thing to do, and if everyone behaved similarly then the Match world would be a better place. (This is not just cheap talk. I did this myself, and things turned out just fine.)
-AT.
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