Post-Interview Communication 2009-10

So far we have:

University of Kentucky - Phone call (late january)

Southern Illinois (phn call from PD)



It would be helpful if we had a blurb about their message content to you. Also context for the date when they contacted you would be great. I think (late January) as used above will suffice.

I know we all have to take this stuff with a grain of salt, however, I think it is interesting data to track.

Merlin,

I understand what you are saying, and I agree that one shouldn't change their rank list based on contact as I know it varies from program to program....I suppose if a program is contacting people who are ranked highly, it'd be nice to know if you are in that group or not. its also nice to know if they are playing games and contacting a large amount of applicants.

Southern Illinois (phn call from PD)

anyone hear from george washington? they said on interview day that they would be contacting their top guys

While it IS fun to get correspondence from programs/chairmen/residents, do NOT, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCE, craft your ranklist based on whomever or whatever contacts you (or not). Most programs do NOT make any communication, and you'd be rather silly to not rank your favorite program at the top because it didn't give you a call/letter/email/etc.

I was told by the infamous PD at UMKC: "We send out emails alerting our top 10 that they are, in fact, in our top 10. This is NOT a guarantee that you'll match and, for that matter, if you're number 10 you will probably NOT match here... we're just giving you information so that you'll know."

As for anecdotal evidence (which is the N=1 of a meta-analysis): I got a couple of post-interview contacts, and I still matched at my number 1 which didn't give out the time-of-day after interviews.

It's to the programs' advantage to contact you, not yours.

I think it would also be helpful to add a brief sentence or phrase about what was said in the post-interview communication. Something brief, but something that might help if there are programs that send different messages to different applicants, i.e. "You are ranked to match" vs "We ranked you highly" or something to that effect.