An anonymous commenter on otomatch brought up an interesting solution to the ENT interview scrum that happens every year. Make a match for interview dates similar to the match for residency positions.
The problem:
How to optimally schedule applicants with interview spots and minimally disrupt applicants education during 4th year of medical school.
Applicants want to maximize the number of interviews, minimize costs, minimize amount of time and attention necessary to optimize interviews during fourth year of medical school. Applicants are VERY concerned about missing an interview invite that arrives via ERAS, email, cell phone, or text message and require an immediate response via ERAS, email, cell phone, text message, thalamus, survey monkey, interview broker, cell phone, text message or even postal mail.
Programs want to minimize the number of unused interview spots (late cancellations), minimize interview changes, and maximize the number of students interviewed that will rank their program highly.
Fairness considerations:
Prevent interview hoarding (booking multiple interviews for same day by single applicants)
Prevent dirty invites (sending out a mass of invitations to more applicants than available spots)
Parameters:
Atomicity of the Interview-Travel Day Pair
Applicants can only interview at 1 program per day and must take the day after the interview off to allow for travel to another interview.
Programs must conduct all interview activities on the day of the interview and the evening of the interview. No dinners or social events on the night before.
Single event
No trading of interviews by applicants or programs once results are released.
Other restrictions
Potentially a limit on the number of interviews per position (program side) and number of programs applied to (applicant side) could be implemented.
Current situation:
Residency interview offers are sent out over the course of 3-4 weeks every year. Applicants spend an extraordinary amount of time monitoring otomatch, reddit and slack for when interview invites are released by each program. They are also required to keep in constant contact with email, ERAS, and cell phone to allow them to respond within minutes to an interview invite due to fear of a dirty invite or interview date conflict.
Logistics
During the ERAS application process, students must rank the programs they are applying to in rank of preference when they submit applications. This is prior to the release of program interview dates.
Programs must submit their interview dates and the number of interviews per date prior to downloading applications. Interview dates must be during 8 designated weeks (Nov, Dec and 1st week of Jan excluding Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years week). Interviews can be on any day of the week Sunday – Saturday).
Programs must submit a rank ordered list of applicants to interview 4 weeks after being able to download applications.
On a designated date, applicants are sent their list of matched interviews.
On the same date, programs are sent their list of matched applicants with interview dates.
Potential Problems
Problem #1: travel logistics may make some sequences of interview dates impossible.
Solution: Day after interview is not available for applicant to interview. This will allow travel time for the applicant. This allows a theoretical maximum of 28 possible interview dates over the course of 8 weeks (8*7/2). Realistically, no applicant will be able to schedule and attend all 28 potential interview dates. An expected maximum would be 24 (three per week x 8 weeks). Typical for a highly competitive candidate would be 16 (two per week x 8 weeks).
Problem #2: applicants applying to multiple residency types
I don’t have a solution to this unless other less competitive residencies agree to be bound by the rules of ENT. They likely will not benefit from these rules and may even be hurt by these rules.
Problems #3: applicants enrolled in the couples match
Similar problem to multiple residency types. I don’t have a solution to this problem either.
Problems #4: applicants have less control over travel costs because they could be assigned sequential interviews in LA, NY, LA and then Philly with much higher costs than LA, LA, NY, then Philly.
Legit problem if travel is required. Potential ability to mitigate travel costs by grouping rank list geographically, and this would reflect an applicant’s preference for lower travel costs.
In the era of Zoom interviews, it’s not really an issue. In fact, the travel day could even be discarded, shortening the interview period to four weeks.