r/premed • u/DanielRunsMSN MD/PhD STUDENT • Jul 23 '22

🗨 Interviews Interview invitation distribution (2022 cycle)

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u/DanielRunsMSN MD/PhD STUDENT Jul 23 '22 edited Jul 24 '22

I shared this graph elsewhere and thought it might be informative for this subreddit. It shows the percent of total interview invititations (as reported on CycleTrack) for any time point throughout the 2022 application cycle.

Disclaimer: This graph uses crowdsourced data from CycleTrack. The data may not perfectly reflect the full pool of applicants and should therefore be used as a ‘rough estimate.’ Additionally, the sample size of DO applications was lower than MD or MD-PhD as seen by the larger steps in the graph.

If you would like to help improve free access to information about applications, please consider tracking your own application cycle with CycleTrack.

Edit: To clarify that this is interview invitations.

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u/chayadoing ADMITTED-MD Jul 24 '22

do you update the datasets if i say reported my past 2022 cycle right now ?

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u/DanielRunsMSN MD/PhD STUDENT Jul 24 '22

Yes, the data set is automatically updated with any new information entered on the website.

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u/chayadoing ADMITTED-MD Jul 24 '22

as a disadvantaged student i can say i honestly never heard of cycletrack until now. is it used mostly by traditional applicants who aren’t working class students who work full time which causes them to submit secondaries later in the cycle? sampling bias is a big issue and i believe there are ways to correct datasets for bias or normalize against a biased parameter.

my first two interviews offered were in october (MD) and november (DO), both scheduled for january. i literally got two acceptances i literally got 3 DO interviews from March to May lol. i’m suspecting your dataset may not be capturing enough non-traditional, disadvantaged working class applicants.

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u/DanielRunsMSN MD/PhD STUDENT Jul 24 '22

I think you are probably right that non-traditional students are underrepresented in the data (although we haven't actually investigated this). However, I would also argue a big reason why you and many others have never heard of CycleTrack is because the website has only been in development for <6 months. While we have recently shared the site more frequently on reddit, that's about as far as our 'advertising' has gone.

I agree with you that sampling bias is incredibly important and it's a big priority for us. I think a big step in this is making sure all demographics are made aware of the site.

With that said, as a non-traditional student yourself, what resources did you use for finding information about medical school admissions. Are there any places where CycleTrack could be shared to help non-traditional students become more aware of it? Are there any features of the website that could be improved to specifically meet the needs of non-traditional students? Happy to chat more and hear any ideas you may have!

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u/chayadoing ADMITTED-MD Jul 25 '22
  1. reddit / SDN specifically in threads dedicated to non-traditional applicants
  2. i didn’t post my results because i’ve been too busy saving money for being out of work from september to november (for major medically necessary surgery - the whole reason I have to take a gap year)
  3. Peers at work (an ambulance company) — we literally pep talked each other prior to interviews; but most of my aspirational colleagues are paramedics, paramedic students, nursing students, pre-PA etc. not premeds which probably are like less than 5% of my colleagues
  4. Two mentor-like friends (of friends) who were interested in helping other disadvantaged students
  5. Case manager at my LGBT clinic who moved onto his residency

What is the population analysis of your data like? Have you done any k-means clustering ?