If any of you interviewed at Emory, you know that the interim chair there usually gives the applicants good, unvarnished advice as a group at the end of the day. I don't completely agree with it (I'll explain this at the end), but it gave me new insight into the process. I'll try to paraphrase his comments as best I can.
Applicants tend to rely too much on "gut feeling," and they need to have the discipline to sit down before lists are due and compare the programs based on five factors. Assign a score from 1 to 5 for each of the five factors, and tally them up. These scores may be modified as you go on more interviews (i.e. a program that scores a 5 on interview day may be clearly surpassed by a program later in the season, and that 5 becomes a 3 or 4). A lot of applicants that rely on "gut feeling" end up matching at the last program they visit and like, which is ridiculous.
The five factors are as follows:
1. Resident satisfaction. If you choose to weight any of these five criteria, weight this one.
- Commentary: This one is especially difficult for me, as residents seem really happy on interview day pretty much everywhere. I can detect subtle differences, but those are often explainable by the fact that it's a Sunday vs Friday night, that someone is on a tougher rotation, etc. I feel like I don't get a straight answer to most of the questions I ask. Even if I force them to say something they'd rather change, they just clam up. So this hasn't helped me much at all.
2. Program Director.
- Commentary: I usually can get a pretty good feel for how much residents like their director, and I also feel like I get a good sense of which program directors are enthusiastic about their jobs and which ones are going through the motions on interview day. One of the higher yield comparators, in my experience.
3. Diversity of program strengths.
- Commentary: Every program says they have good psychotherapy training. The best questions to ask about this is how supervision works. Patient diversity, site diversity, and research opportunity are somewhat easier for the applicant to assess.
4. Leadership.
- Commentary: Hard for me to know what to do with this, unless I go to a place where applicants get one-on-one time with the chair. At some programs, the chair is in transition, but I don't think that this has much bearing on my training.
5. Location
Commentary: Obviously a very subjective criterion, but one of the easier things to compare.
Common mistakes applicants make:
1. Basing too much of their impression on the weather during the interview day
2. Basing too much of their impression on whether their interviews went swimmingly well or poorly - you never know who is just having a bad day
I agree that these are all (with the possible exception of leadership) good things to take time to research and take notes on before, during, or after the interview day. I can think of a lot of other important factors, too (program size, resident autonomy, curriculum flexibility, fellowship opportunities, etc). I also agree that you have to sit down and figure all these things out. But if you rely on a numerical formula to make your rank list, you're also making a huge mistake. Chances are, the "score" will correlate very strongly with your actual impression. But no formula is perfect, and you have to rely on a synthesized gestalt to make your list. Certainly, the factors described should inform your impression, but ultimately, if you rank a place you actually prefer less over your favorite programs, you'll be unhappy on match day (and possibly long afterwards) if the match actually works out the way you designed.
Since I have nothing else to do over Xmas break, I'm going to work on this in an excel spreadsheet. Should be exciting....
