Non-rolling admissions question

[muddphuddwant2b]

At a non-rolling school, does interviewing earlier still mean that you are at an advantage to other applicants that interviewed later (assuming you submitted your app at the same time)?

My reasoning is that whatever pre-interview scores they used to assign you would be higher than the later interviewed applicants, and whatever scores these are would transfer over to the post-interview score. And is it true that at non-rolling admissions, they already know if you are likely to be accepted or not, but just wait until March to tell you?

Thanks!

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[starfun21]

I can't speak to this for sure, but I would likely say no to your first question (in contrast to schools that are rolling, where you definitely are helped if you interview earlier since you are interviewing for more spots). There are two friends of mine on here who both received interviews later than I did to the same school (even up to 4-5 months later), but they ended up being accepted either early than I was or accepted when I was not.

Regardless, I still believe that submitting early is absolutely the best -- all of the above mentioned people still submitted their applications by July, so even though I originally interviewed first, the admissions committees had multiple months to continually consider my friends and eventually saw how incredible they are!

I cannot speak to the second question since I have no background in admissions. But I will add: I feel that at any school, your interview is very important. Especially for MD/PhD programs since they really want to see how you can speak about your research (and especially then those that have chalk talks, etc), it will be key to see how you will fit.

 

[MSTP18]

1st question: Highly doubt it
2nd question: There are always people that the school knows it's going to accept or reject immediately but for others it can and will come down to the wire

 

[Lucca]

In other threads about MD admissions adcoms have stated that even though their schools might be rolling they schedule acceptances such that every interview date has basically the same # of acceptances associated with it. Couldn't say if it's the same for MD PhD.

That being said, if you had info on application time vs %accepted, earlier applicants would most likely be more successful. I say this because as the cycle draws on more and more applicants are being considered for fewer and fewer interview slots. Since MD/PhD in particular tends to have high post interview acceptance rates (when compared to MD at least), I would wager the main bottleneck for competition is at the pre interview stage.