One thing I bet you don’t think about when (if) you think about a doctor’s training is the enormous number of thank you notes s/he will have to write.
Not to put too exact a number on it, but s/he will have to write a LOT of thank you notes.
A lot a lot.
A thank you for every letter of recommendation – and you need recommendation letters for med school itself, residency, and fellowship. Possibly you’ll also need recommendation letters for when you apply to an actual clinical position as well, I don’t know for sure as we have not yet reached that point.
A thank you for every interview – again, for med school, residency, fellowship, and beyond.
And, well, I suppose that’s it. But considering how many residency and fellowship programs you apply to, it could be a lot.
Also, as I found out after my husband’s interview last week, you might not interview with just ONE person. Oh no! He had EIGHT INTERVIEWS with nine different people.
(One of his Chief Residents said that he’s never heard of a person having more than 14 interviews at one program. FOURTEEN. Holy cats!)
So let’s do some math here… (Which I typically avoid at all costs but TODAY I’M FEELING FRISKY.)
Say my husband applied to 60 fellowship programs (which is more or less accurate).
Say he then gets interviews at 30% of those programs.
Say that he goes through an average of five interviews at each of those 20 programs.
That’s an upper-limit of 100 thank you notes!
Consider, though, the guidelines my husband’s Chief Resident gave him:
- You don’t need to write a thank you note to everyone, if you had more than X interviews at one program. Instead, you would write a note to the program director, the fellowship director, and anyone you felt a special connection with during your interviews.
- If you had fewer than X (which is still undefined – I need to ask my husband) interviews at a program, you would want to write a thank you note to everyone.
- You need to make sure that every. single. thank you note is different because, apparently, everyone will compare notes. (I mean, this is sort of common sense, right?)
So maybe 100 thank you notes is a stretch, but certainly 40 or even 50 is NOT.
Let me be clear: I am all for writing thank you notes. My parents drummed it into me my entire childhood. And while I sometimes FAIL and do not write a thank you note, this failure results in guilt that NEVER subsides. Ever.
(Brief Detour: We registered for our wedding china at Macy’s, which has the nice feature of showing who bought you what on their website. So we knew that a setting of our china had been purchased, but – through a quirk of the otherwise very helpful system – the name of the gift-giver was unavailable. And then WE NEVER GOT THE CHINA. So I fear that there was some horrible misunderstanding/shipping mistake/crooked wedding-china enthusiast slash UPS driver that resulted in the gift-giver believing that we got the china but could never be bothered to write a thank you note. Our wedding took place over two years ago and I still think about this! Someone we love is sitting there, sadly, feeling slighted that we never thanked him/her for the generous china setting!)
So, yes, I am an Avid Thank You Note Proponent. My husband is, too. (Although he is more of a Theoretical Avid Thank You Note Proponent rather than an Actual Thank You Note Writer. In some cases.)
But my husband wants to send these fellowship programs EMAIL THANK YOU NOTES.
Listen, I LOVE email. It is one of my favorite things ever. Approximately 90% of the time I would prefer to communicate via email than via any other communication medium.
But EMAIL THANK YOU NOTES make me cringe!
Yes, I know, doctors… busy… blah blah blah. And I realize that this is the twenty-first century and the rules of etiquette need to bend to fit our newfangled technology like email. Also, I realize that – outside of a wedding or a baby or possibly graduation – writing 50 thank you notes is kind of ridiculous.
Furthermore, the Chief Resident says it’s “preferable” to send thank yous via email so that the fellowship program people can simply print them out and put them in my husband’s file.
To that I say, But isn’t it equally easy to open a creamy envelope, pull out a sheet of soft, sturdy stationary, and put the entire card into my husband’s file?
And wouldn’t it give the fellowship people a nicer perspective of my husband, a busy doctor who made the time to hand-write a heartfelt thank you to each of his interviewers?
I mean, everyone loves receiving mail, right? Fellowship program directors must fall under the umbrella of “everyone”!
It just seems WRONG to send a non-traditional (i.e. email) thank you note for something so important!
Am I alone in feeling this way?
Anyway, for the fellowship thank you notes at least, my opinion is moot.
My husband sent out his first round of email thank you notes yesterday. One of the recipients already emailed him back.
Sigh.
Convenience and “my Chief Resident told me to do it this way” FTW. (Said in a terribly defeated manner.)
(They win more arguments than you’d expect.)
We don’t really do thank you notes in Spain… but as the admission (or rejection) decisions approach, I’m starting to get worried because I don’t know how to say thanks to all the teachers that recommended me. Well I’ve already said thanks, but you get what I mean. I was thinking of making some fancy tea cookies but I’m worried that something homemade is (or looks) too cheap. What do you think?
Here in the States, no one is offended by homemade cookies. No one. If they don’t like them, feel free to send them to me. I’ll write you a GLOWING letter.
Ditto. It’s a thoughtful gesture and I think it would be much appreciated by the people who know you well enough to write recommendations.
Okay, when I had the online registry when Elizabeth was born, we had someone buy a batch of stuff off the registry pretty soon after it went up, before I had told anyone really that it even existed. We couldn’t figure out who bought it and then it never showed up. Eventually, I figured out that someone who didn’t know us bought it, obviously for someone with a similar (or the same) name. So maybe that is what happened to your wedding china too?
And I am still feeling very guilty that I haven’t sent the thank you notes for Christmas yet.
We had a very similar discussion after Rob’s residency interviews. He ended up sending email thank you notes immediately since that was what his mentors recommended, and then sending hand-written thank you notes to the programs he was seriously interested in as it got closer to the match day. I thought that was a fair compromise. I also realized this whole residency interview process is so different than any other real world interview that I could let it slide!
I’m with you on this one! I love email, but it should never be used for thank you notes! I would think that if your husband sent out handwritten notes it would really make him stand out – in a good way, probably.
But I guess what the Chief Resident says is what really matters, haha. But I definitely agree with you – handwritten is always better!
I must admit, the first thing I thought of when I read this was OHMYGOD I have to write a THANK YOU NOTE to the people who took FOUR MONTHS to write my reference letters!?! But then I got to the email part and I wholeheartedly agree with your husband- email those suckers. Otherwise you’ll be there all day long!
I’m all for the tradition of writing thank you notes on real actual stationery. If his Chief Resident says that etiquette is changing, I don’t know what to say! Maybe he could follow up with written thank you cards with the top person he interviews with at each place?
Someone bought four ramekins off our wedding registry. Sadly we never received them. I also still worry that someone out there thinks I’m a total slacker for the lack of the thank you card. But we didn’t get them!!
I used to work, in an administrative capacity (arranging interviews and such), for a residency program. Honestly, handwritten thank you notes were rare and while *I* appreciated the sentiment and effort, it was rarely looked at by the interviewers–they’re just too busy. A simple “thank you, nice to meet you and chat about kite-flying” (or whatever you discussed) has a better chance of getting read, remembered, and even responded to. I think you have to adjust your thank you to the conventions of the situation. Academics and physicians are busy and if you sincerely want to acknowledge the time they spent with you, it’s best to do it in a way that acknowledges how very busy they are.
First – we had a wedding gift that came without a card attached. No card, anywhere. We had absolutely no idea from whom it came. There weren’t any card without a present, so I went through the entire RSVP list and matched up gifts to people, but there were multiple who didn’t give us a gift (totally fine, I mean, we didn’t spend $60 for you to eat or anything. I’m fine with it. Really!), so we had no idea where to send the thank you card! It’s not like I could call them up say, “Um, hey, did you happen to get us this present? Oh, you didn’t get us a gift? Oh – That’s cool!” *Awkward* It still haunts me to this day that we didn’t send a thank you note to someone! (But I do feel better that other people have had something like this happen and still obsess over it).
Second – I am 100% on board with handwritten thank you notes. It has been ingrained in me since I could write. My question: How nice of stationary do you use? (This is the type of information I glean from blog land). Flat letter type, or a folded card? Maybe with the hubby’s name on the front? Or would it have some form of gratitude on the front? Blank on front? Help! Clueless already. Not that we’re to the residency stage yet, but I’m making sure one goes out to all of the doctors that my hubby shadows!
Stationery – we just get some nice, semi-formal-looking thank you notes at Target or whatever. I personally love a beautiful piece of really high quality stationery, but I don’t think anyone will hold it against you. I hope not. Since we don’t spring for the fancy stuff.
This is the one case in which tradition is wrong. Let your husband do the email thank yous.
Remember that there are always people who are going to go over the top and do ridiculous things and sending paper thank yous has traditionally led to sending gift baskets too, or flowers, or sports tickets. THAT, of course, is illegal.
Also, the thing about the thank you needing to go in the file is also accurate. An email will get there faster (when interviewers are more likely to remember who you are) and is less likely to get lost through multiple hands of the USPS, university mail handler, department secretary, etc.
I did email thank yous for medical school interviews–at the request of some of my schools (others forbid thank yous of any kind)–and it was completely OK.
(I know, medicine is weird with its dumb impersonal rules.)
Glad to have stumbled here, never read a blog with this perspective.
At the law firm where I worked, decisions were made before handwritten notes could have been delivered by mail, so e-mail thank you notes were actually probably better.
We had a similar wedding gift situation! It was for an inexpensive item, but I still wonder, “what happened to that gift!”
I love handwritten thank you notes. I think they are almost more sincere – it take a little more time to write something out yourself and then send it. The giver will probably get more joy out of opening a note. But in terms of the filing of it, I don’t know…that’s tricky.
Actually, I might be petty but I really dislike when I give a gift and am not thanked. I don’t need gushing, but especially when I mail something I want to know it arrives. (Sorry to fuel your fire about the mystery wedding gift! Oh dear!)
This is a tangent, but what do you think of family thank-yous? My boyfriend’s family doesn’t do notes or anything at all but I still think it’s nice to acknowledge a gift, even if it’s from family. Boyfriend disagrees and says it’s family so it doesn’t need to be acknowledged.
I’m a traditional girl. I appreciate a stationary-written thank you note over an email one. But I guess with how our technology-dependance is growing it isn’t all that surprising that more and more are going virtually. Regardless, any thank you notes I write will be hand written.
I just asked my husband and he sends hand written thank you notes for residency interviews. I also send hand written note for interviews.
Well an email thank you would be better than NOTHING, since so many people in the world are NOT avid thank youer-ers. Which I don’t understand. I think people should say thank you, which a card. Things are changing and I shall drag my feet.