What about if there are class ranks, does that factor a lot into program choice
But that's just for top programs, right
Uh... Aren't you mid career or older? Things have gotten a lot more competitive. All passes isn't going to garner invites at top programs anymore. A handful of passes isn't going to sink someone but if I have a student with all passes they are going to have to apply pretty broadly and average number of applications per applicant is over 60 now.
Agree. A good thing about psychiatry as a field in general: less score and grades obsessed than other fields. A challenge as a psychiatry advisor: gauging how competitive people are for particular programs is not easy, as so much hangs in intangibles. And that's if we narrow the focus to the paper application/getting interviews. In terms of interviews themselves, I might have two students who look very similar on paper, but I may worry about how one will perform in interviews and not the other. Or I might have one student I am really anxious about whether they will get interviews at all, but confident once they are interviewed programs will want them.
Step and clinical scores do matter. Even if the clerkships are P/F, they still put you into a quartiles/ranking for each clerkship even without having individual clerkship grades, which we can see on the selection committee. Even schools with preclinical P/F have "letters of distinction" or something else that identifies strong performance.
Psych underwent a spike in competitiveness starting about 5-6 years ago (again, to being mid tier competitive, not strataspheric) but things have changed enough that if you finished training 8 years ago, which means you matched 10+ years ago, the match is very different now and unless you work directly with medical students and residents on at least one side of the process, it's really best to recognize that your information is extremely out of date and not weigh in. I mean this in the best possible way, but those of us who do this regularly have to invest quite a bit of time and effort making sure we are current and well meaning input from people who aren't involved in the process generally falsely reassures.
I think the first paragraph is good advice for OP and for top programs, but this isn't a true blanket statement. I'm not saying grades don't matter, but where I'm at clinical performance (specifically through solid audition rotations) carry a lot of weight. Here, step scores only matter if they are low enough to cause concerns for passing Step/Level 3, otherwise we generally don't care about that much.
i mean only for top 10-20 programs.
Oh wow, good to know. I was worried about program choice or the possibility of psych getting too competitive. I guess relatively few (compared to the overall total) of med students prefer the more hands on and procedural specialties. Works for me, I don't care about getting some top tier residency as long as I still get good offers as an attending
TP's statement isn't really accurate with the current climate as others said above. You're not getting ii's at all the top places with a mediocre app. That said, you don't have to be a superstar to match psych either. I applied during one of the more competitive years (only 4 spots for SOAP) with an app that was quite weak statistically and did not struggle. Applied to 75 programs, went to 8 interviews, and matched by top choice. Fairly confident I wouldn't have dropped lower than my 3rd or 4th choice anyway but didn't matter. At the same time, I know people who had much better apps who didn't match at all. Having a good match strategy can be just as important as your actual stats and scores.
I don't understand what the purpose of this question is. Are you able to go back in time and change your clinical grades? Apply to places you want to go, if you are shooting for a lot of tier 1 places, have some reasonable back ups in solid academic programs in geography you like. Learning to not fuel neurosis is a big part of psych and you can get a leg up on that part of residency training right now.
And also.... The person best positioned to evaluate your app is your dept advisor. Advising quality can vary a lot (particularly at schools without their own psych dept) which is one reason I answer questions here. But any top 20 school has at least one faculty member designated to be a main contact for medical students. Often it's the clerkship director. Make a plan to meet with them this summer. We want you guys to match and are usually extremely invested in the process.
Your students (and this forum) are lucky to have you!
