Whenever someone posts a thread asking if he or she might still get interview invites even though it's pretty late in the cycle, people reply that invites can go all the way through March or so and to not give up hope. However, wouldn't all those late invites be given to people who applied late? It just doesn't make any sense to me that if I was complete at a school in early August, that school would take eight months to decide whether I should be interviewed or not. It seems much more likely that I have been silently rejected, and all of the February and March interviews were given to those who were complete in October or November. Can anyone with insight into this please share what you think?
1) As I say repeated in these forums, the order of submission is only partially related to the order of evaluation, II and review. Application and candidate evaluations timeline varies widely by school may not done in a linear, chronological order. EDP, High achievers, URM, family of alumni, feeder schools, associated UG programs, linked postbaccs, and other factor may push an app forward in the process.
2) This order is also very dynamic. When you submit, your application is screened, assigned some priority for evaluation, a reader gets to it and you may wind up pushed up or down in priority. As new applications are submitted, you may wind up being pushed back and down in priority.
3) A school will have some sort of scoring or classification system at every step. For argument sake, lets say it is out of 100. The first interviews may go to those with 95+, then 90, etc. But if a new application comes in at 95+ eval, it will push the rest down
4) And, momentary rant, there is no such thing as a "silent rejection." Why do I say that?
Because everyone, every single applicant starts as "not accepted" (or rejected). Medical schools are deciding on acceptance/alternate alone. Notice I didnt say "acceptance or rejection." You are already unaccepted. First offer of interview and then offer of acceptance. Schools have no obligation to inform you of any other action.
Also, for schools that do not randomly review their applications, is it safe to say that the people they give interview invites to right away or early on are those who they really like and prioritize? In this case I don't mean early as in receiving an invite in September vs. March, but more like September vs. November.
1) No school randomly review application. There are not enough resources or time to do so.
2) As I said above, all schools score or classify every application at every step of the process
But even if schools do end up giving you late interview invites, didn't they still pass you up the first time? Because they weren't prepared to offer you an invite until they saw how you compare to other applicants, to me, that just means they don't like you enough and are using you as a last resort in case they don't get the people they really want. I understand that getting interviews late in the cycle is possible, but I still feel that not receiving them in the early months is a sign that you don't have a very good shot at getting in. Thoughts?
1) You are making the assumption that schools have somehow gone thru all 5,000 application or so by now. This cycle, I have had more than one applicant to more than one school get an email that the schools is still evaluating applicants
2) They werent comparing you to other applicants on an individual basis but in the aggregate as in your evaluation score. It wasnt low enough to say "you are no longer under consideration but it wasnt high enough to get an interview yet. You got people ahead of you
You are reading into it a bit too much. The order in which interviews go out may or may not be related to the fitness of your application; there's just no way to tell without speaking to the particular members who reviewed your application. Just because a school says that they review applications linearly does not mean that they don't skip around at all; much of what a school says is more to make applicants feel as if the process is more fair than it actually is. Stop overanalyzing, relax, and don't take it as an ego blow even if you're interviewed on the very last interview day. There may be a reason for it, but the reason is not that you're any worse than any other applicant no matter what your neuroses (I have them too, you know) tell you.
As above. This process is completely fair. The school's mission is to produce MDs for further training and they will find the best candidates to do so. Oh, you mean fair to applicants? Sorry to say that applicants are the raw material for the process of producing MDs. The fairness is you can apply or not. Once you accept that, you are in the system and rules that you accepted.
