Admission Timelines And Application Guidelines
Timeline
ERAS Post-office opens: September 1, 2009
Application deadline: October 31, 2009
Interview notification: Week before Thanksgiving
Interview dates: January 11, 12, 13, 19, and 20, 2010
Rank order list certification deadline (NRMP): February 24, 2010
Match day: March 18, 2010
Application guidelines
The Stanford University Department of Radiology prides itself on the diversity and achievement of its residents. We welcome applications from enthusiastic, high achieving, and intellectually curious individuals of all ages and ethnic backgrounds.
Applications to our residency program are accepted only through the Electronic Resident Application Service (ERAS). Completed applications and supporting documents (personal statement, curriculum vitae, transcript from medical school, three letters of recommendation, Dean’s letter, and a photograph) should be received by the last Friday in October of the academic application year. The Dean's letters (MSPE’s) are usually sent out in early November.Receiving a Dean's letter after the October deadline will not affect your application.
Selection criteria
Radiology residency programs, including ours, receive a large number of applications. In soliciting letters of recommendation, we suggest that you get letters from faculty members who know you and your work very well, rather than from a famous faculty members with “big names” but who do not know you personally. Ideally you will have a mix of letters from clinical faculty in diverse specialties, both in Radiology and from your clinical clerkships. If you have done substantial research, for example in an MD-PhD program or a dedicated research year, an additional letter from your research mentor or advisor is expected.
We will be matching for nine residents and typically receive over 500 applications. From this pool we select 70 candidates to interview in January. As much as we would like to, we cannot interview all interested or qualified applicants. Most candidates selected for interviews have high USMLE scores but we do not use a fixed “cut-off”, nor do we grant interviews based on high scores alone. Factors such as specific research or clinical achievements, clerkship grades, AOA, and personal characteristics are more important. Please note that a rotation spent here during medical school is neither necessary nor sufficient to obtain an interview. You should view an away rotation as an opportunity to learn about our program, rather than as an “audition.”
Stanford is both a premier research institution and a nationally-recognized clinical referral center. Because clinical skills are paramount on our demanding and intensive hospital rotations, successful candidates will have demonstrated outstanding performance in the core clinical clerkships. We also hope that those who seek a clinical career primarily will want explore the opportunities presented by our numerous and varied research programs. First and foremost, candidates should have the personal integrity, collegiality, and strength of character necessary to thrive in clinical medicine.
The interview process
All candidates are interviewed during the space of approximately one week in January. Candidates are interviewed by four faculty members and our chief residents. Each selection committee member interviews every applicant in order to elicit the broadest possible picture of each interviewee. This tight time frame makes for an intensive interview process for our selection committee, but enables us to maintain a vivid picture of each applicant during the ranking process.
Approximately 14 applicants are interviewed each day. Half of the interview group will tour our facilities with residents and faculty in the morning and interview in the afternoon, and the other half of the interview group does the reverse. For both groups, the interview day will begin at 7:30 and end by 3:30 or 4 pm. We host an informal dinner with our residents the night before the interview and lunch with residents on the interview day. Please plan to derive as much information as possible about our program on the interview day, as we cannot and do not grant “second-look” visits.
Final note
Radiology faculty and residents work one-on-one every day, all day, throughout the residency program. Therefore, the interview is our most important factor in resident selection. When the dust has settled and USMLE and clerkship grades have been tabulated, MSPE and recommendation letters have been decrypted, and personal statements have been deconstructed, the selection process comes down to whether we feel applicants’ character and personality are a good fit for our program. Our residents are highly intelligent, intellectually curious people who strive to excel in whatever they do. Most importantly, we pride ourselves on the esprit de corps and camaraderie among our residents, fellows, and faculty. Meeting applicants is vital to our selection process. We believe you should view the interview day as an opportunity to meet us and determine whether Stanford is where you want to spend the four most important years of your medical training.
Best of luck and congratulations on your choice of the most exciting and dynamic medical specialty there is—Diagnostic Radiology!
