Just Curious: Who has been interviewed and then rejected?

[Strawberriemllk]

I've found similar threads for other medical programs but none for vet. So has anyone been interviewed and then rejected? Getting an interview is an accomplishment in itself, so I was wondering what do you have to do for them to reject you after an interview? Do they put everyone that they don't outright reject into a pile and then figure out the 100 or so they want to accept and everyone else are alternates?

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[nyanko]

Depends on the school.

In the past few years, UCDavis has interviewed about 220 applicants for about 133 seats in the class. Yes, once you get an interview your chances are numerically better than they were, but it still isn't really a given. Mostly because UCD in particular does not accept a lot of OOS students, there's really no point in compiling a waitlist past maybe 15-20. So even saying that 150 of the 220 interviewees will be accepted or waitlisted, there are still 70 people who will receive a post-interview rejection. I was one of those in 2008.

My application problems in that year extended far beyond my interview, though. Yeah, my interview wasn't stellar, but I don't think it was awful enough to be the "dealbreaker" as it were. So it wasn't anything in particular I did or said during my interview that earned me a rejection.

 

[pennyonthefloor]

Three years ago, I was interviewed at OSU and then rejected. They gave me the reasoning that, even though my interview was spot-on and near perfect (score-wise), the points I got from the interview didn't add enough to my overall ranking to push me into the pool of accepted.

 

[katryn]

UT works very similarly. Interview invitations are based on points you earn from quantitative scores. You get additional points from subjective issues in your interview. The two scores are added and the top so many people are given acceptances, a certain number are waitlisted and the rest rejected. All three times I applied, I had high enough quantitative scores to interview, but it wasn't until my third interview that I scored high enough to total in the acceptance list.

 

[Coquette22]

Similar to katryn, but at a difference school. I got an interview at and then subsequently rejected from AVC, basically due to how their process works. Interviews are offered strictly on academics (GPA/GRE) and then experience is looked at after the interview. I had the marks to get an interview, but was lacking in experience compared with the other people who interviewed, so it was a no go for me last year.

 

[DVMDream]

I got an interview at Washington and was then rejected last year. They told me that my interview was fine. My experience good, but could be broader and that my grades were just average. So I had a good interview, ok experience (only SA for vet and SA/wildlife for animal); and average GRE/GPA so they accepted those that were slightly better than me, but at least I knew it wasn't the interview after that rejection I started thinking: did I ramble too much, talk when I shouldn't have, ignore one person and pay too much attention to the other, did I accidently fart or maybe even pick my nose without knowing...? But I was told that the interview went well so there are many reasons to be rejected post interview other than a bad interview.

P.S: Yay for the many run-on sentences/misspellings that are probably in the above paragraph!

 

[Mama070609]

Last year I interviewed at VMRCVM and was rejected. I was told nothing negative about my interview and that my experience was good. According to what I was told, the reason I didn't get in was because my GPA and GRE score were both a bit lower than they would have liked. I'm sure that was relative to the scores of the other good interviewees that they had.

 

[Strawberriemllk]

Thanks for all the response everyone! =) So what I gather is that, basically the interview could go perfectly, but if someone who has a little better test scores/gpa or more/broader experience then me is more likely to get the spot.

 

[katryn]

Thanks for all the response everyone! =) So what I gather is that, basically the interview could go perfectly, but if someone who has a little better test scores/gpa or more/broader experience then me is more likely to get the spot.

That's exactly it.

 

[Coquette22]

Right. Your interview may go perfectly, but once they tabulate all the scores, you might come up short in some other area. Not all applicants go into the interview on equal footing.