April Interview Thread

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GuzzyRon

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I got a late interview invite at the University of Toledo College of Medicine for sometime in April. Upon asking my admissions office contact person if they had any seats left or if I will be interviewing for a 'waitlist spot,' she answered, "well, our 2007 entering class is full, but the admissions committee is still handing out acceptances." 🙄 Now, I'm not sure if I should accept or decline their invitation. 😕

So who else has any April interviews coming up? Are you going to attend or decline? Why?
 
I got a late interview invite at the University of Toledo College of Medicine for sometime in April. Upon asking my admissions office contact person if they had any seats left or if I will be interviewing for a 'waitlist spot,' she answered, "well, our 2007 entering class is full, but the admissions committee is still handing out acceptances." 🙄

Now, I'm not sure if I should accept or decline their invitation. 😕

Most schools, including the ones at the very top, accept 3 to 5 times their entire class size before getting enough people to fill their spots.

In my opinion, the end of March marks a new beginning for the majority of acceptance offers.

In fact, you probably have a better chance of getting in now than you did before (in comparison to getting waitlisted).
 
Most schools, including the ones at the very top, accept 3 to 5 times their entire class size before getting enough people to fill their spots.

In my opinion, the end of March marks a new beginning for the majority of acceptance offers.

In fact, you probably have a better chance of getting in now than you did before (in comparison to getting waitlisted).

Thanks for this interesting statistics. But can you tell me where did you come up with this 3 to 5 times acceptance?
 
Thanks for this interesting statistics. But can you tell me where did you come up with this 3 to 5 times acceptance?

I don't have time to do a full spectrum analysis, but let's take some random anecdotal evidence off US News.

Yale, for example, only accepts 100 students outright (come March 23rd). Ultimately they accepted 220 students last year. Hence, you're fighting for 100 spots on March 23rd, but an additional 120 spots afterward. Hence, your odds of getting accepted after March 23rd are greater than your odds of getting accepted on March 23rd.

Yale, of course, has a relatively high retention rate. If you like, we can go to a less popular school, like UCSD. For a matriculating class of 122 students, they accepted 301 last year. Now UCSD is a rolling school, so the same exact conclusion can't be made, but if you aren't in the first 122 (if you call the admissions office and they say they've accepted their full class), you've still got almost 200 more chances to go.

The ratios increase non-linearly as you go down the list. Most of the top 20 schools accept 2-3x their incoming class, while those below accept 3-5. The two exceptions to this rule are Harvard and Mayo, each accepting only about 1.2-1.3x their class size.
 
I don't have time to do a full spectrum analysis, but let's take some random anecdotal evidence off US News.

Yale, for example, only accepts 100 students outright (come March 23rd). Ultimately they accepted 220 students last year. Hence, you're fighting for 100 spots on March 23rd, but an additional 120 spots afterward. Hence, your odds of getting accepted after March 23rd are greater than your odds of getting accepted on March 23rd.

Yale, of course, has a relatively high retention rate. If you like, we can go to a less popular school, like UCSD. For a matriculating class of 122 students, they accepted 301 last year. Now UCSD is a rolling school, so the same exact conclusion can't be made, but if you aren't in the first 122 (if you call the admissions office and they say they've accepted their full class), you've still got almost 200 more chances to go.

The ratios increase non-linearly as you go down the list. Most of the top 20 schools accept 2-3x their incoming class, while those below accept 3-5. The two exceptions to this rule are Harvard and Mayo, each accepting only about 1.2-1.3x their class size.

Thanks for your useful information. On the University of Miami web site, they said they interviewed 148 out of state students and accepted 41 last year. If Miami is a middle of the pack school and accepts 3X their incoming class, that means those students who were interviewed had a 80%+ probability of being accepted. That is really interesting statistics and give hope to all of us on waitlists at this moment.
 
I don't have time to do a full spectrum analysis, but let's take some random anecdotal evidence off US News.

Yale, for example, only accepts 100 students outright (come March 23rd). Ultimately they accepted 220 students last year. Hence, you're fighting for 100 spots on March 23rd, but an additional 120 spots afterward. Hence, your odds of getting accepted after March 23rd are greater than your odds of getting accepted on March 23rd.

Yale, of course, has a relatively high retention rate. If you like, we can go to a less popular school, like UCSD. For a matriculating class of 122 students, they accepted 301 last year. Now UCSD is a rolling school, so the same exact conclusion can't be made, but if you aren't in the first 122 (if you call the admissions office and they say they've accepted their full class), you've still got almost 200 more chances to go.

The ratios increase non-linearly as you go down the list. Most of the top 20 schools accept 2-3x their incoming class, while those below accept 3-5. The two exceptions to this rule are Harvard and Mayo, each accepting only about 1.2-1.3x their class size.

This also varies quite a bit from year to year. The Dean at Yale said that two years ago they only accepted 58 off the waitlist - it is just that variable.
 
This also varies quite a bit from year to year. The Dean at Yale said that two years ago they only accepted 58 off the waitlist - it is just that variable.

True, but everything varies, and for every downward variation, there will also be an upward variation.

Then again, the numbers I pulled were from two years ago (Fall 2005) so maybe the Dean means "3 years" ago, or Fall 2004.
 
Thanks for your useful information. On the University of Miami web site, they said they interviewed 148 out of state students and accepted 41 last year. If Miami is a middle of the pack school and accepts 3X their incoming class, that means those students who were interviewed had a 80%+ probability of being accepted. That is really interesting statistics and give hope to all of us on waitlists at this moment.

Since you seem so interested in U Miami, I just looked up their stats on US News. US News claims 32 OOS matriculated out of 86 accepted (almost 3x accepted of matriculants). This is out of a quoted 161 OOS interviewees. This would imply that more than 50% of interviewees will ultimately get accepted.

This is from the Fall 2005 admissions statistics, so that was 2 years ago. Your numbers are from last year, so it gives good comparison for variation between years.
 
I got an interview invite yesterday to go to Vermont CoM on April 5th, but I'm going to decline as I already have an acceptance I like and I don't want to move to the East Coast (if I were to get in). If, however, I didn't have the acceptance I would go. If you really are interested in the school, you should take a look. Yeah it's late in the game, but you still have a good shot if you have a decent interview.
 
Since you seem so interested in U Miami, I just looked up their stats on US News. US News claims 32 OOS matriculated out of 86 accepted (almost 3x accepted of matriculants). This is out of a quoted 161 OOS interviewees. This would imply that more than 50% of interviewees will ultimately get accepted.

This is from the Fall 2005 admissions statistics, so that was 2 years ago. Your numbers are from last year, so it gives good comparison for variation between years.

Do you have a link to the US News article?
 
True, but everything varies, and for every downward variation, there will also be an upward variation.

Then again, the numbers I pulled were from two years ago (Fall 2005) so maybe the Dean means "3 years" ago, or Fall 2004.


No, both could be true. Here's how.

The March acceptances are not only 100. They are slightly more. The first batch of acceptances go over. Then waitlist acceptances top up once that initial number gets depleted below the capacity. In running some numbers, waitlist chances at a couple places (based on detective work, some speculation, etc....) seemed to be 1/4 for a place where post-interview outright acceptance is 1/2. Chances do go down, when the *over*acceptance initially is taken into consideration.
 
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