Originally posted by ckent
I am planning on going to all but one of my interviews so far, and I am planning on ranking just about everywhere that I interview at (as long as I could stand spending 3 years there of course). You should probably ask how many people your program interviews, because I've noticed that some programs are not very selective when inviting applicants for interviews. I think that I will end up interviewing and ranking close to 10. The good thing about medicine is that even if you don't match, I think that you can always scramble into a mediocre program. It have to be some university affiliated community program in primary care, but at least you have a very low risk of being unemployed for one year even if you aren't smart about your ranking. The advise given to us at our school is to interview at anywhere where you think that you'd be interested in going to, and rank everywhere where you wouldn't mind being. I know people at my school who only ranked 2-5 programs and ended up matching fine though. I think that the stronger the candidate you are, the less programs you should feel like you have to rank and interview at as long as 2-3 of them are "sure" shots.
Just another thought on this matter: before the whole application process, I always thought that going into a residency in medicine should be something more of a buyer's market - as opposed to smaller, highly-sought-after fields like ENT or dermatology. ie. a solid applicant should be able to pretty much go anywhere he/she wants (maybe save for the ultra-elites like MGH, etc) and programs are going to compete to hire you to their program. Looking at the un-filled program statistics on scutwork.com also support this: there are a lot of solid programs in this country that goes unfilled.
However, experiencing the application process first-hand involving some of the better programs in the country, I must say that this is not unlike the application for medical school - programs are still highly selective in interview invitations, some programs receive anywhere from 1000-2000 applications and interview only a small fraction of that number. And after that they only rank a fraction of those whom they interview. At my home institution (a pretty solid program), the PD told us they would get 1200-1500 apps/yr, interview 350-400 and rank maybe 100-150 to get the entering class of 30 or so, and they say they rarely have to dip below 100 on their ROL. I would imagine other good programs will have similar statistics.
So, with that said, I think the "safe number" of programs to rank has a lot to do with what caliber of programs you are applying to/interviewing at. If you are interviewing predominately at the MGH/BW/Hopkins type of programs, I would imagine you will need to rank a lot more than, say if you are considering the local programs. If geographically restricted, then probably ranking some lesser programs within a location is not a bad idea. ie. if especially interested in SF, would be stupid just to rank UCSF and Stanford no matter how good you think you are.
For IM, my dean of student always advise us to interview at 8-10 places that we think we really want to be at, and from that list, rank ALL places first, then purge from the list any that we absolutely DONT want to be at. This way, most people will rank 7-8 acceptable programs. She boasts that nobody from my school has ever go unmatched in IM.
