A reader writes: "A few people have said that once you receive an interview invitation your numbers pretty much cease to matter and your interview (and to a lesser extent letters of recommendation) becomes the main criteria used to determine where you're ranked on a program's match list. Can you comment on the validity of this? Thanks!"
Ahh, interview season! The anxieties, the insecurities, the uncertainties, the dreaded "scuttlebutt", rumor, and innuendo!
It's really hard to generalize, but based on the handful of programs I've had personal experience with (and essentially confirmed by others, like Swanny and psychattending, et al) there is some truth to the idea that your numbers get you the interview, and your interview gets you the ranking.
Here's how we work it: I'm on staff at a "midtier" community hospital program (though personally I think we train folks pretty danged well!).
We interview around 60 for 6-8 places. On interview day we hand in an eval sheet to our coordinator which rates the interviewees on several scales--academics, personal commitment to psychiatry, verbal and written communication (of which realistically the personal statement is our only guide), how enthusiastically their letter-writers sang their praises, and even how interested/connected they are to our location. Come February, the coordinator and chiefs will present us with a spreadsheet that preliminarily ranks everyone according to their cumulative scores across all these domains. We'll also announce who we've offered pre-matches to, given that we do see a good number of strong IMGs and DOs. We run through a ppt slide show with everyone's pictures, along with the narrative comments (pro and con) from the evals, and then get down to business.
Basically we end up throwing out 10-15% as just not rankable. The remainder are divided into "pursue", "rank", and "I suppose it would be better to have them than take a random scrambler". The last few years we've filled before getting very far into the bottom half, anyway. We'll argue a bit about where to position some applicants within those top two categories, and it tends to come down to personality, interview style, and occasionally a particularly strong advocacy from a faculty member who knows the applicant. However, I wouldn't say that the final rank list differs tremendously from the preliminary one.
Keep in mind that we want to get good people--folks that will do a good job taking care of our patients, who will show up on time for call, and who really WANT to be psychiatrists. We end up as surprised as you at how the Match falls out in the end sometimes.
