Turning down interviews - how bad is it?

[Meerkatology]

---

Members do not see this ad.

I applied to too many programs and it looks like i may have to turn down some interviews, simply because i can't take off that many days from rotations.

Preparing for the worst, if I end up not matching somehow and have to reapply does it completely destroy my chances at places that I've turn down an interview at?

Do they keep records like this?

How would you phrase your email when turning down an interview?

 

[docbill]

I applied to too many programs and it looks like i may have to turn down some interviews, simply because i can't take off that many days from rotations.

Preparing for the worst, if I end up not matching somehow and have to reapply does it completely destroy my chances at places that I've turn down an interview at?

Do they keep records like this?

How would you phrase your email when turning down an interview?

Well. Just the fact that you already have too many interviews and it is not the end of Sept yet, I am sure you will not have a problem matching this year.

Be realistic. If you have good scores and good file then turn down the programs you don't really want. No use in reserving an interview now only to cancel it in Dec when it is too late to invite someone else.

 

[gutonc]

If I were in your fortunate shoes, I would say yes to every interview offer this early in the season. Go ahead and schedule everything. Even if you have to double book or book back-to-back. Then, come Nov. 5 or so, once the MSPEs are out and the programs waiting on that have sent interview offers (assuming you don't hear from all the programs you applied to before the MSPE even comes out), and only then, you should start cancelling and/or re-scheduling them. This gives programs time to offer that spot to other applicants and gives applicants plenty of time to schedule and go to the interview.

You're in a position every applicant would kill to be in.

 

[Meerkatology]

You're in a position every applicant would kill to be in.

well not necessiarly, i applied to 60 IM programs, while avoiding big names / university/academic places. I wasn't very confident with my stats so I tried to find noncompetitive places and 60 seems to be overkill, and i haven't matched yet so who knows.

part of the reason being that i failed an M2 rotation, so the 2 month remediation bascially took away my 2 month of discretionary period in m4, meaning that its even harder for me to schedule interviews🙁

 

[dragonfly99]

I think it is very very unlikely that you will fail to match. It is not too late to apply to more programs. If there are some that are more competitive that you avoided due to fear, you should just go ahead and pick out 4 or 5 of those and apply, IMHO. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I think that for IM, even if you have some sort of defect in your transcript, if you go to 8 or 10 interviews the odds of not matching anywhere would be extremely low. In your situation, you might want to hedge your bets and go to 12 interviews or something. Perhaps you can fix is so that you have back to back interview days in the same city or cities, to save money.

It is definitely all right to turn down or cancel interviews, and I with the number of applications they get in IM, I doubt programs would even remember the next year. Also, you would have/would have had a good reason for turning down some of the interviews...you just could not afford, time and money-wise, to go on all of them. I actually turned down a few cardiology interviews - it is an O.K. thing to do. The way you do it is you drop them a very polite email saying that you were very flattered to be offered the interview, but you ended up with just too many interview invitations and you could not accept them all, and you wanted to let them know ASAP. The only thing you don't want to do, if possible, is to wait until a few days before and then cancel - that's rude if you can avoid it.

You could do what was suggested above and just hang on to interview invited until Nov 1st and THEN cancel the ones you don't want. However, if you already have 30 invites, then it's time to start culling the list now, b/c you can't go to that many interviews.