CANCELLING INTERVIEWS ? REMEMBER THE ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY

For those qualified and/or lucky candidates bestowed with multiple interviews who choose to either decline some interview invitations OR decide to cancel an Interview later, kindly do let respective residency program coordinators about it immediately - and the reasons go higher than mere courtesy.


Why ?

a. You will do a huge favour to the residency programs by saving them money and efforts over arranging your interview, stay and food.

b. Secondly, you do a magnanimously huge favour to a fellow IMG who gets lucky because of your notification. After you notify a program about a cancellation - the programs can schedule the next best candidate on their screening list for an interview. And Remember : that interview could potentially be the only god-sent interview for some IMGs.


Yet, each year some IMG candidates continue to be a "no-show" , i.e. just do not show up when they are expected. This makes it too late and sometimes administratively impossible for some programs to schedule another interview. And even if they do, it results in a prohibitive costly interview for some IMGs. Let me cite a story to explain this point better. The last year(2005) a friend happened to call up the Brown University IM Program about his application status. The program was pissed that some candidates had decided to dump their interviews just one day before the appointment. They offered my friend 24 hours to make it to Rhode Island and said that they could not arrange a hotel stay since the booking was already cancelled. Now, since that happened to be the only IM interview offer he had , he decided to take it. Guess what - the last minute air-ticket and hotel booking purchases raked up a bill of 800$ ! That would not have been the case if he had more time.


For the same reasons, the same goes for people who accept a prematch offer - besides withdrawing from the Match (if you register with the NRMP by then), kindly let all programs that invited know that about it.


Note: When you make that call or write that email to cancel - remember to thank them again for considering you and politely cite a reason for the cancellation :-)