The growing consensus regarding residency interview thank you notes is that most residency Program Directors (PDs) won’t respond to your thank you letter. Many might not even have the time to open the thank you email an applicant sent after a residency interview. During the 2019 Emergency Medicine Residency Association (EMRA) Resident forum, some Program Directors admitted that the pile of “Thank You emails” tends to grow neglected over the season, and they don’t get a chance to respond back.
That said, do residency interview thank you emails matter in applicant decisions? Given that many PDs don’t even have time to respond, one would assume that these post residency interview thank you emails don’t matter. But, a 2019 study about “Post-interview Thank You Communications” in Western Journal of Emergency Medicine seems to say otherwise. In this study, anonymous surveys were sent to EM program directors nationwide. Of the 99/163 PDs who responded, 22.6% reported that an applicant could be moved up their program’s rank list and 10.8% reported that an applicant could move down a program’s rank list based on their thank-you communications, or lack thereof.
The validity of this study is debatable, as PD responses could be qualified by availability and recall bias. However, it is interesting to note that more than half of the PD’s who incorporated thank you letters in their rank decisions considered specific content of the ‘thank you’ communication to be important.
So what does this mean for you?
A residency interview thank you email serves a purpose: it acknowledges the complex nuances of the interviewing process, and offers a token of appreciation for the people who will soon become your peers, faculty, and mentors. Furthermore, these followup emails are a good way to follow up on fun topics that you may have discussed or had in common, such as providing book recommendations, food recipes, points of connection that humanized you during the interview.
Here’s our opinion: It is worth sending thank you letters to individuals and programs after your residency interview.
We’re going to cover the following: