I’ve been reading through the waitlist support thread from last year and thought I’d compile the info to make this year a bit easier for myself and others. Settle in, this could get lengthy. All credit goes to the great and powerful
@gyngyn —he is doing God’s work on these forums. 99% of this is from last year's posts, but I didn't quote it. Go look it up if you'd like.
April 30th is
traffic day. AMCAS sets the guideline that people with multiple acceptances have to commit to one school and take their name out of consideration at the others. After traffic day, adcoms can see the schools that their accepted and waitlisted students are holding acceptances at. Each school has its own rules, but from what I gather the students are coerced into making a final decision quite quickly.
Since April 30th is a Sunday this year,
May 1st is the day of real traffic day. HOWEVER, this does not mean we need to panic and compulsively check our emails/portals/SDN/etc because
there might not be that much movement this day (not that it’s going to stop me). Most schools accept more than the class size to buffer for initial traffic day flow. Gyngyn said many times in the past that if a waitlist is moving that it means the school has gone through their buffer students and the waitlist will continue moving.
The earlier a waitlist begins moving, the better. That means there are lots of students that are giving up their seats for us lowly peasants who haven’t been offered one yet.
There are waves of waitlist movement. Once a student is offered a spot, they have a certain amount of time to decide. Schools batch offer the empty seats, wait for decisions, then fill the holes. I believe these waves are every couple of weeks. Waitlists continue moving until orientation, but the bulk of the movement is in the first month or so (this could be off, details are a little hazy here).
On a side note, I'm on the waitlist at USF (my only MD interview). USF hasn’t accepted many students since January according to the threads from this year and the previous ones, so it might be the case that certain schools build a larger waitlist rather than the buffer acceptances. This is mostly speculation but it may explain why some schools have huge waitlist movement and others are quieter. USF is already accepting off of the waitlist according to the thread.
Poaching kept coming up and I didn’t understand why it kept being repeated. Let’s say a student is accepted to school Y and is on a waitlist at school X. After traffic day, school X can see that the student is holding an acceptance at Y, but X decides to offer the student a seat. School X has to notify Y of the offer, but the student is largely unaffected by the poaching. The student goes to the more desirable school and Y has a new seat to fill. X has poached the student from Y. The cascade starts after that, Y poaches from Z and so on.
Now we come back to
@gyngyn . He can see all of the other schools his accepted and waitlisted applicants hold acceptances to. Since he is based in California, there will be lots of overlap with CA, AZ, private schools, etc. Alabama? Not so much. In the past, he has updated with the movement after he sees it, noting which schools (only the ones with overlap) post acceptances. Again, he's doing God's work so maybe we don't pester him with questions all day long? (movement at X? movement at Y? movement at Z? -- I imagine it gets a little tiresome). Also sorry gyngyn if you're not a dude, but I've seen the male pronouns associated before so I figured I'd run with it please correct me if I'm wrong.
Also, I encourage everyone to monitor your own school's subforum and post movement either here or in whichever thread becomes the pseudo-official waitlist thread. Not that it really helps, but I'd love to see lots of movement in Florida to potentially open up some seats at USF (I only need one). All of this is just so I don't feel so helpless waiting for news--really don't like that USF doesn't allow updates but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Lastly, DO waitlists have a different system. I believe their traffic day is May 15th, but I'm not positive. Currently sitting on four of those waitlists too so I'm sure a DO version of this thread will become active in May.
Good luck everyone.
Even then I feel like it will be so hard to work on a re-app because it's so easy to think "what if." I hate how this whole thing is structured.
Though after making it, I can definitely see why she charges so much. It took 3.5 hours to make the cake from start to finish. Then after you assemble the cake you're supposed to freeze it for at least 4 hours.
