A quick story to make you appreciate the current system….
It was totally the wild wild west. For Clearinghouse you'd get a list of sites and it was literally you against the clock bc sites would accept apps until a certain time (or ongoing) or sometimes cut out early bc of so many apps. It was a team effort by your cohort, as someone would go through the list of sites, another person would do editing, the person applying would be on the phone with sites, etc. Sites would do phone interviews right then, and if you were lucky you'd get an offer.
I can't remember if you could hold up to 1 offer and then call your top place and say you have another offer or if you needed to just decide; it really was chaos. There might have been a time limit for a site to offer/withdraw a spot, though I can't remember for certain (10+ years ago). I just remember running back and forth from the printer and being in the computer lab with papers spread everywhere and our DCT coming in and out to check on things.
I helped a friend a couple years ahead of me, though thankfully she was in at 8am, I think it started at 9am, and before noon she had an APA-acred offer and accepted it. There would be maybe 30-50 APA-acred. spots, so those would go quickly. She only applied to a handful of sites, got interviews, but missed on matching. It was long enough ago I can't recall if the application was by fax and/or email, I just remember looking at that stupid site list and highlighting all of the APA-acred sites for my friend. I was stressed and it wasn't even my app!
So yeah…be thankful for the current system. 😀
Good luck to everyone.
