I didn't originally pick up on the sarcasm either, but just to add to the above post, i was about to call bulls**t on this person based on the mass general website's application page:
http://www.massgeneral.org/medicine/medicine_res_apply_us.asp
where it says:
"Invitations will be sent in late November"
As an aside, if I applied to UCSD but didn't get an invitation yesterday as one of the above posters did, do I consider that a rejection unless proven otherwise? Or do they send out invitations on more than one occasion?
While I'm flattered to have received invitations already, it would bother me if I got rejected from any program before my Dean's letter is released on nov 1st because you would think that a document that contains a summary of my academic performance in med school would matter...at least as much as anything else that's been uploaded to ERAS....but then again it just suggests one thing: board score cutoffs. Oh well. Pisses me off that you can go to a top ten med school, publish over 10 articles, win a bunch of prestigious awards, work your butt off to get all honors grades during third year, and other stuff that i consider accomplishments and your app can be tossed in the trash if you don't score above an arbitrary number on a standardized test. Are places like that looking for good test takers, or people that will make good doctors?
Don't mean to vent, but it's just frustrating knowing that some programs filter out applicants based on board scores alone, cause it downplays everything else we all do in med school that would give programs a sense of who would contribute their talents to a program. My personal gripe is that if I get rejected from some of the academic programs because I don't make a board score cutoff, that's enough of a reason to dump my app, but if I've published more articles than most junior faculty at their institution, no one will ever know cause the secretary won't print it out cause it doesn't make the board score cutoff, which for all i know could be by 1 point. oh well, if that happens then it's just not meant to be.
