Residency interviews can be a daunting prospect. So, too, can the uncertainty following them.
What should you do after the interview? The answer is going to differ depending on your individual circumstances. Insights from recent residency applicants and faculty members offer some direction on the dos and don’ts of after-interview etiquette. Here are a few key nuggets for residency applicants.
The AMA helps medical students master the residency-application process so you can make the right decisions about your career, prepare for a knockout interview, explore residency opportunities—all so you can successfully match.
Capture your first response
Immediately following your interview, you should take a few minutes to capture your initial reaction.
“Interviews, after some time, do tend to blend together a little bit, although every program is unique in its own way,” said AMA member Liz Southworth, MD, a pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgery fellow at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. She advises that residency applicants “quickly jot down some thoughts” after the interview’s completed.
Dr. Southworth specifically recommended the National Resident Matching Program’s Prism app, which she said is “nice because it lets you rank programs as you go.”
Bukky Ajagbe Akingbola, DO, a fourth-year ob-gyn resident at the University of Minnesota, spoke of a colleague who recorded short videos of his impressions following his residency interviews.
“As it came time to rank those programs, he’d have those videos as a resource to rewatch,” she said. “It’s a long interview season and it may be hard to recall how you felt about [an] interview you did in November come January.”
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Heed a program’s communication protocol
If a program says they don’t respond to post-interview communication, don’t worry about following up. If you do follow up and don’t hear back, don’t read into it.
“If a program says: ‘Please do not contact us afterwards. We are so thankful you interviewed with us, but we do not engage in post-interview communication’—just don’t,” Dr. Akingbola said. “I know that sounds very basic, but sometimes, especially as the interview process goes on, it might be hard to fight that urge. The program I matched at didn’t explicitly tell us not to, but they didn’t respond to communication. ... If you don’t hear anything, know that it is probably OK.”
If you do follow up, don’t overdo it. It’s unlikely to make you stand out in a positive way, according to one program director.
“It almost never makes a difference [in the decision on an applicant] and I certainly don’t write it down if someone doesn’t send a thank-you note,” said Hilary Fairbrother, MD, an AMA member who is the vice chair of education in the emergency medicine department at the University of Texas at Houston. “I have gotten some head shots—I think that’s a bit strange. I understand you are trying to be remembered, but I interview over 100 people, so it’s hard to make a connection.”
If it’s necessary, Dr. Fairbrother noted, she can call up an applicant’s photo on the Electronic Residency Application Service.
It is also worth noting that the National Resident Matching Program has rules around post-interview communication, stating “applicants may request and exchange clarifying information with programs following the interview but must not solicit or engage in post-interview communication for the purposes of influencing or ascertaining a program’s ranking intentions.”
Dive deeper:
- Meet Your Match: What to do after your residency interview
- Which factors do applicants weigh most when picking residency programs?
- Residency interviews: Don’t forget to ask these 7 key questions
Follow the road to residency
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Continue gathering information
The interview is an important data point for your rank-order list, but it’s hardly the only one.
During an episode of the “Meet Your Match” series of the “AMA Making the Rounds” podcast, AMA member Chadd K. Kraus, DO, DrPH, MPH, said that alumni outreach is an avenue that can help applicants gain deeper insight into a residency program.
“So many programs have a long track record of putting graduates, alumni from their residency and fellowship programs, out into practice,” said Dr. Kraus, a former associate director of an emergency medicine residency program. “And while some of those experiences may be more dated—someone may have trained in a program 10 years ago—you still are able to, again, put more pieces of information into your decision and make a more informed decision.”
While acknowledging it can feel awkward to “cold call” alumni, it’s not all that uncommon or at all out of place, Dr. Kraus said.
“Specialties and communities in medicine are very small,” he said. “And so, there are usually not many degrees of separation between you and an alumnus from a program,” he said. “You can get a little bit more information about what really it's like to train in that program, what professional opportunities that alumni have had because they trained in that program.”
As Match Day grows closer and applicants finalize their rank-order lists, don’t forget to consult FREIDA™, the AMA’s comprehensive residency and fellowship database, which includes more than 13,000 Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)-accredited residency programs and offers a streamlined user experience.
