True, but isn't this the purpose of SDN as a whole? Common sense plus searching the forums will give you answers/advice to almost anything (including whether or not to take secondaries seriously).
You can't possibly summarize the corpus of SDN knowledge in one thread.
This thread
could have been useful, but it's pretty clear we're not going to get there.
What would be valuable would be specific information about specific schools, in a more reflective format than the interview feedback.
Too much of the advice on sdn is both too general and too obvious. Tips for interviewing well: don't be socially awkward. Don't be a douche bag. Don't smell like you just finished eating the poop hot dog.
There's also a lot of "Top 20's want to see this," or "Make sure to do XYZ for your applications/interviews at research-slanted schools." Well, guess what? Not all of the "Top 20" schools want to accept 150 of the exact same applicant. And pretty much every school thinks they're slanted toward research. Just like every medical school tells you that what really sets them apart is their clinical curriculum, early clinical experience, or some other [clinical] bs.
And before I continue let me say that I'm not going to read through the school-specific threads for 20 different schools to try to get the info I want. That would take forever.
What would be great is someone who could say, "I was accepted at Penn, Case, and Cornell but rejected from Hopkins and Columbia," or, "I was accepted at Georgetown and SLU, rejected at Loyola, Rush, and Creighton," or whatever.
And then say, "When I called Hopkins/Columbia/Loyola/Rush/Creighton about my file, they told me I was rejected because/could improve upon xyz."
Even if it's just "objective" criteria and doesn't have anything to do with the rejected applicants terrible breath or inappropriate cleavage, it would at least give
some insight into what matters at a specific school.
That kind of information can be extremely useful, and not just in a "ace your interview like the con-artist that you are" sort of way. That kind of information can help people decide if they even want to bother applying to a given school.
Right now the best advice I've been given in that area (shout out to CougarMD) is to read schools' secondary prompts from the previous years, and that will give you an idea where their priorities lie. But even in the secondaries the schools start to blend together more than they should. When you start to get specific information from people who have been at the schools, you can start to tease them apart.
Last spring there was a thread in the school-specific forum about choosing between Columbia and Cornell. The schools are obviously very similar, but after a few people talked about their different impressions from being in each school, meeting both deans (and other faculty), you could see that for everything they have in common, there are actually quite different reasons to choose Cornell, or Columbia, depending on your priorities.
Specific information would be useful, and it would be great to condense it into fewer threads. Life would also be a lot easier if I had a personal chef, a maid, and someone to do all of my homework for me. We're never going to get there.
