Interview Selection

[Member432]

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Hi, I was wondering if any residents/attendings would be willing to share a little bit about how interview selections are made?

-How many people are invited to interview/spot typically?
-Who reviews the applications?
-How do programs balance their "program tier" with "applicant tier" when sending invites?
-How much influence do chairs/PD have in this process?
-Are their really waves of invitations sent, or do most programs just have one bolus?

I know that these things vary with different institutions, but it would be interesting to hear how this all gets done 🙄

 

[Gfunk6]

I suspect that you will get a different response from every institution as these are highly specific.

At UCSF we used to do the following:

1. The program coordinator would print out ALL applications without any screening
2. All applications are reviewed by three individuals (the Program Director, a Physics or Radbio faculty member, and a resident representative); all applicants are assigned a score of 1-10 and the top 21 or so applicants are invited for interview; invites usually go out in two batches (local applicants and everyone else)
** Obviously, if the Chair or other faculty favors a particularly candidate then they may be invited for an interview anyway.
3. On the day of the interview, all applicants talk with the three folks above + 4-5 additional faculty members
4. After all interviews, applicants are assigned a score of 1-10
5. All interviewers meet after an aggregate numerical ranking of all applicants is created; the final rank order is then decided upon but can be heavily modified based on any number of factors

 

[yeasterbunny]

I suspect that you will get a different response from every institution as these are highly specific.

At UCSF we used to do the following:

1. The program coordinator would print out ALL applications without any screening
2. All applications are reviewed by three individuals (the Program Director, a Physics or Radbio faculty member, and a resident representative); all applicants are assigned a score of 1-10 and the top 21 or so applicants are invited for interview; invites usually go out in two batches (local applicants and everyone else)
** Obviously, if the Chair or other faculty favors a particularly candidate then they may be invited for an interview anyway.
3. On the day of the interview, all applicants talk with the three folks above + 4-5 additional faculty members
4. After all interviews, applicants are assigned a score of 1-10
5. All interviewers meet after an aggregate numerical ranking of all applicants is created; the final rank order is then decided upon but can be heavily modified based on any number of factors

Sounds pretty similar to what we do - PD and other faculty and senior residents sit in a room, each file is looked at by at least 2-3 different reviewers and assigned (blinded) scores. There is generally a soft step 1 cutoff, just because otherwise the sheer volume of applications would otherwise be prohibitive, but applicants we know or who have ties to the region may be considered too. Usually students from our school or who have done an away here will be invited regardless. Generally there will be a "bolus" of invites, as you say, for each respective day we will be interviewing.

On interview day there is a standardized numerical eval (plus interviewer discussion) to make it easier to rank, but this just sets up a cursory rank list which then gets shuffled at the discretion of the PD and other factors.

Oh and we definitely consider not only "program tier" and "applicant tier" when we decide on invites (though this is very subjective) but also regional biases, i.e. we know born and bred Californians are less likely to rank Minnesota highly. This is not firm either, however, in fact recently about half our matches have been folks from very different parts of the country. I should clarify that this is really only a factor when deciding on invites, once we have met everyone we rank mostly on how much we really like them, not on how they are likely to rank us.