Interview Season?

[pathalot]

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Hey guys I'm a third year med student trying to set up my 4th year schedule. When would be the best time to take some vacation for interviews? I'm thinking of taking mid November and early December off. When do most places start interviewing? When does interview season end? Thanks for your help.

 

[JPmamd09]

Hey guys I'm a third year med student trying to set up my 4th year schedule. When would be the best time to take some vacation for interviews? I'm thinking of taking mid November and early December off. When do most places start interviewing? When does interview season end? Thanks for your help.

My interviews were in Nov, Dec, and Jan. I know several people who had October interviews. I was advised that path interviews generally take place a little earlier than other specialties. I'd say Nov and Dec would be a good time to take off. Also think about how many programs you want to interview at and allow yourself enough time so you don't get burned out. Hope this is helpful.

 

[PathMD2010]

Frieda will tell you when each school is doing interviews. I am completely anal retentive and so I made a graph of the dates so that I could take the peak interview time off.

Generally you start getting invites September into October. Get most invites by November.

Interview Nov - Jan. typically. I had one interview in October, one or two in November, did the bulk in December, and finished up in Jan.

For scheduling purposes, I would take one month off for interviews and pick light rotations (can get at least 3-4 days off somewhat easily) for the other months. Taking end of Nov, start of December off sounds great.

A word of caution: don't schedule more than 3 interviews a week. It is too much.

 

[pathalot]

thanks for the advice guys 🙂

 

[gottamatch]

I've got a classmate who took 2 complete months off for interviews, and I heard there is an applicant who took 3!!

My interviews were mostly Nov and Dec. If you are flying all over the place, I would recommend doing 1 interview a week (the most relaxing way according to my experience). Sometimes you don't have a whole lot of choices, though.

 

[pathalot]

Yeah, I'm at a east coast school and gonna be applying to mostly west coast programs. Hopefully I can set up my interview schedule such that I can take a few weeks or a month to go out west and do the majority of interviews without flying back and forth. How much leeway did u guys get in picking dates for interviews and setting up a good interview schedule? thanks again

 

[lifehouse51]

Programs can contact you as early as Mid-September or so, and you may get some offers in November/December, but unlikely in January or after. What I did was I scheduled the bulk of my interviews in a month (November), then whichever places I heard back a bit later I pushed them to Mid-Late January. Remember that even if a program offers you an interview early, you can push it back to later if it makes it cheaper to travel to certain geographical regions/easier scheduling.

And yea, I think the max you should do is 3 interviews/week, even if they're all in the same state/city. Ideally 2 interviews/week max I'd say.

 

[Euchromatin]

I took December off (more for the holidays and to coincide with my significant other's vacation) and scheduled light rotations for October and November. I had several interviews in October and was finished by the second week of December, except for a few schools that took a really long time to offer invites. Those I either just canceled or scheduled for January.

I found that many schools were very flexible about when you could interview, particularly those that had interviews nearly every day and only did 1-2 students at a time.

There are a few places around that do group interviews, however (I had one group of 4, and two with groups of 8-10). Those schools may only offer interviews once a week or even less.

 

[PathMD2010]

I was also applying largely to schools outside my current geographic location and so I understand your problem.

You can definitely cluster them to cut down on trips.

Most schools offer an average of 4 different dates, at least from my experience. Early interivew invitations often ask when you would like to come. I did not apply to west coast schools. At a few institutions, I could not make any of the dates they offered and found that the schools in most cases were quite flexible.

After talking to my classmates, path seemed to be one of the more flexible specialties in scheduling interviews.

Some prioritization takes place as well. Toward the end of interview season, people tend to run out of money and energy. I had to cancel half of my Jan inerviews but was able to make most of my earlier ones.