It’s about who you know

Mini rant sorry… not directed at everyone but the few who seem to think it’s incredulous they didn’t get offers…

I’ve seen a lot of posts on here recently saying things along the lines of “I’m a perfect candidate I have so much experience and so many pubs wtf is going on!!!” Which has been kind of shocking to me…

Yes this is a very difficult year, but this field (is and always has been) very strongly impacted by who you know, the connections you have, and what people think of you (like pretty much every other field of work). You have schools like UW for example that are almost impossible to get into if you don’t have previous experience working or being a student at their school or UTSW where almost half of their incoming class have previously participated in there other programs or worked there.

So my advice to those applying next cycle and later is to actually get experience at the school you want to go to or meet people from those schools. You would be shocked how far ahead of everyone one else that puts you. When all the applicants are great and have X amount of pubs and X amount of years of experience… of course the school is going to take the applicant who also has experience working with them.

I didn’t think this was rocket science but it appears people don’t understand how powerful networking is in ANY field of work.