Do people still handwrite thank-you notes?

[instantcoffeecu]

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I really enjoyed some of my interviews and wanted to do something more than a standard emailed thank-you. Do people still hand-write thank you notes? Does email suffice in any scenario?

 

[runner125]

I've wondered about this too. I tried to ask my pre-med adviser about sending thank you notes for MD/PhD and MSTP, and she said definitely send them, but she didn't seem to have any advice beyond that. I'm not really sure whether to send emails or hand-written thank you cards or just brief letters. It's seems like a lot to send actual snail mail to everyone I interviewed with, especially when that was about 7-8 people at each school. The ones I have sent out so far are just brief letters (like a paragraph) sent through snail mail.

 

[echosensei]

I have received both e-mail and snail mail thank you notes from MD candidates that have interviewed with me and I do not have a particular preference for one over the other. However, if I receive an e-mail from a candidate I was particularly enthusiastic about and the candidate says in the e-mail that we are in his/her top choices, I forward the e-mail to the program director. I don't do that with snail mail. Just something to think about.

 

[24thGrade]

Schools I send hand-written wrote thank you notes to:

0 acceptances / 2 interviews

Schools I send no thank you notes to:

5 acceptances / 5 interviews


And no, I'm not mixing them up. And no, I didn't write awful desperate-sounding notes. I just don't think they actually make a difference. The e-mail point made above is a good one though- I could see other profs maybe doing this as well.

 

[Neuronix]

I hand-write thank you notes.

 

[QofQuimica]

I hand-write thank you notes.

I do too, unless the interviewer explicitly tells us not to. (One PD did tell us not to send him a thank you. In that case, I sent a follow-up email about something we discussed during the interview.)

I agree that whether you send a thank you note doesn't affect your odds of getting accepted (or ranked, in Neuro's and my cases). But you should send them because it's polite to thank people who go out of their way to do something for you, not because you're trying to get something out of it. If you think about it, nearly everyone you meet at your interview day is a volunteer, and they're spending time that they could be doing something else to interview you, talk with you at lunch, take you on tours, host you, etc. I certainly appreciate it when students I host or interview acknowledge it, although I also don't hold it against them if they don't. (It's not like I can be bothered to remember who did or didn't send a thank you card!) Just another perspective to consider.

 

[Neuronix]

Just another perspective to consider.

As much as I agree with you Q about how you should write thank yous, I think this your argument is not a real world argument. I will give two reasons as examples.

First, the interviewing program is getting trainees or slave labor for their programs. In the case of MD/PhD students, the medical school gets a high quality lab rat. In the case of residents, the program is getting an employee/laborer. They have a vested interest in interviewing you. Even for a md program, they are getting large amounts of tuition out of you.

Second, when I used to student host, I went far out of my way for the people I'd host. I almost always altered my own plans, took the hostee out for drinks and/or dinner, I sometimes cooked for the people I hosted, I always had to make them a bed, wash their sheets/towel, etc... I have done student interviews, and the time and effort invested in those per student really pales compared to the time I spend on hosting.

I almost always received thank you notes for interviewing. I almost never received a thank you note for hosting. I never once received a gift. Once someone bought me a drink at the bar after I complained about this phenomenon to him. But, the people I'd host never usually even offered to help me at all. The people I'd cook for didn't do dishes. They never even took down their sheets on the bed I provded for them. One guy puked in my trash can and didn't even take that out the next day when he felt better.

So I'm a bit jaded on the whole thank you note thing. A real heartfelt handwritten thank you is one thing. I've received that exactly twice in dozens of interviews. What I usually get resembles a form letter. It looks like it could have been written to any interviewer and they just changed name of school X to my school. Once my interviewing is done I have no further feedback on the applicant, so it really doesn't matter if you write me a thank you note or not. But this formality of sending letters just irks me. If I could I would deduct points for the form letter people. Especially since they tend to be "thank you for interview me, now let me spend the rest of a full page telling you why I'm great."

Once I started giving my e-mail address out, I started getting one or two line thank you e-mails instead of form letters. I feel rather the same way about that.

So my opinion is handwrite a real, thoughtful thank you note. Or don't bother. But that's just my own emotional opinion that has no basis in reality.

 

[QofQuimica]

You've told me about your hosting misadventures before. I don't know what to tell you, because none of those things ever happened to me, and in fact, most of the people I hosted did bring me a gift of some type and/or write a thank you. One person who flew here from another country brought me a bottle of wine from there. Don't ask me how she got a bottle of foreign wine through airport security and customs--I didn't ask any questions! People got me starbucks gift cards, goodies from Trader Joe's, took me for dinner, etc. Anyway, not to discount your experience, but you have to understand that it's not necessarily everyone's experience.

As for the work of interviewing, no doubt it's more for me since I'm an adcom and I am one of the people who presents the student at the meetings. So I'm not just showing up to chat for half an hour--I would say I have an hour of outside work to write up my eval (bulk of the work) and skim through the app (brief--the faculty read it more thoroughly). I'm also attending adcom meetings every other week for two or three hours a pop whenever I'm in town, and I've been doing that for four years now. I stop by applicant lunches to say hi and answer questions when I have a few minutes. I have consistently put a lot of time and effort into admissions volunteering the entire time I've been in med school. And all I got for it beyond my own warm and fuzzy feelings was listing it as an activity on my ERAS and an occasional something from the admissions dean thanking me for my help. So, yeah, it's nice to be acknowledged once in a while.

As for the argument about getting slave labor, well, that sure doesn't drive my volunteering! Heck, I'm not even going to be there next year when the current applicants start med school, and they sure don't pay any tuition to me. And grad students are a mixed bag. Beginning students definitely require more work to train than they give back. Obviously later the opposite is true. But either way, the grad student only works for one PI, so most of the faculty who interview a specific applicant won't be able to directly benefit from having that applicant work in their lab. Also, considering how many applicants pass through every year, it's not like the return from interviewing a bunch of them (many of whom won't even end up at your school) is going to be all that great in terms of recruiting future prospects to slave away in the lab.

Anyway, it would be good if people would just be grateful for what they receive. Which reminds me that I should really send thank yous to the people who have been hosting me. 😳

 

[Rumit]

I just got a hand-written thank you note from a program director following my interview. Kind of surprising, considering how many applicants they interview. It also makes me feel kind of bad about my relatively short email note that I sent.