Observing my own experience and that of my peers, it seems reasonable to assert that one of the worst aspects of this process is the uncertainty of waiting for invites or rejections. According to APPIC, last year 3,847 people registered for the match. In aggregate, what is the effect of generating this much anxiety/uncertainty among nearly 4,000 people for weeks or even months? How many of us haven't been as focused as we could have been seeing patients, conducting assessments, or teaching classes? How many are less present in our personal relationships? How many got fewer hours of sleep or experienced the myriad other detrimental effects of stress? -- unnecessarily, I would argue.
Yes, life is stressful. Being a clinical psychologist is stressful. And distress tolerance is indeed a good and useful skill. However, aren't we also taught as psychologists to evaluate and improve systems/dynamics that are unhealthy, when we reasonably can? In my opinion, the most reasonable improvement to this mess of a process would be to simply have all sites agree on a set notification date (yes, some sites do indicate a notification date on their APPIC page, but none of mine have adhered to it so far and that seems to be par for the course for others).
There is precedent for a set notification date in Match Day and the externship process in my area -- both seem to work quite well. As far as I can tell, this would have at least 4 strengths that the current process does not: 1) applicants get to make informed choices about where they will interview. This is particularly relevant when one inevitably applies to sites with the same interview dates, hears from one of the sites, has to respond immediately to confirm an interview date/time (not to mention make expensive travel arrangements), but does not yet know about other potentially conflicting interview opportunities; 2) sites can have greater confidence that when people confirm interviews they are definitely coming and will not back out later when they get an interview the same day at a preferable site (I admittedly have no data on how often this happens, but I'm assuming it does); 3) application review and meetings among internship program faculty about applicants can be planned and prepared for (far) in advance (I'm guessing I'm not the only person in academia who has noticed that if a due date, grant deadline, or meeting can be pushed back, it will...); and 4) the most important point, I believe: it adds a small, but meaningful degree of certainty to this uncertain process. Knowing that one will find out on a particular day increases the likelihood that one can focus on other tasks and more or less go about life as one otherwise would. Instead, we face another week of neurotic email refreshing and SDN checking, minds preoccupied with an uncertain future just in time for the holidays.
Thoughts?
