Not meeting a PD during an interview day?

[PhakeDoc]

A couple weeks ago, I was at an interview with a program I was thinking quite highly of in my "mental ROL before interview season". Anyhow, the PD met with all the applicants in the morning as a group while giving a presentation, and then interviewed a couple of applicants. However, after the morning session, nearly 2/3s of the applicants never saw the PD again during the day. In fact, I think we saw the dept. chair more than the PD.

I actually had a couple of questions for the PD, but since I never saw the person, I posed those questions to my interviewers, but didn't really get satisfactory answers from any of them.

I've not been to many interviews yet, so am not sure if this is a common practice (I hope not).

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[gutonc]

I've not been to many interviews yet, so am not sure if this is a common practice (I hope not).

Very common, especially in larger programs where they may be interviewing 30-40 people a day. There's no way the PD can meet with every interviewee. If the program is that large however, they should have a couple of asst PDs who could meet with you to answer your questions.

This is certainly worth an email to the PD (be sure to cc the PC as well) to ask the questions you didn't get to ask. Or, if it's still high on your mental ROL at the end of January, consider a 2nd look.

 

[MCYan]

From my experience, schools arrange for at least either the PD or the chair to interview you.

 

[SouthernSurgeon]

3 out of 4 programs so far have not had any designated time for everyone to sit down/interview with the PD - like gutonc said, there are just too many people there and if the PD interviewed them all it would take 15 hours (30 min x 30 applicants).

Now that said, the PD was generally around for the whole day, and I made it a point to introduce myself in person, thank them, and ask a question or two.

 

[PhakeDoc]

Sorry, I should have stated that there were only 9-10 applicants being interviewed that day (activities lasted from 7:30am - 5pm)