How we verify

Dear Applicant,

Application season runs on rumor. Group chats, forum threads, a friend of a friend who heard a date wrong. This page is the standing promise about how this brief works, written down so you can hold us to it.

Every deadline, statistic, and mechanic we publish is checked against the primary source (NRMP, AAMC and ERAS, ECFMG, the peer-reviewed literature) and linked to it. If we cannot find a primary source, the sentence does not ship. When you read a date here, you should be able to click through and see it on the official page in under a minute. If you ever cannot, that is a defect: reply and say so.

When we get something wrong, the correction runs at the top of the next issue, plainly, not buried in a footnote. Being fast is worth less than being checkable.

We explain how the system works: the calendar, the mechanics, the published data. We do not tell you where to apply, how competitive you are, or what your rank list should say. Your deans and mentors know your file. We know the process. Those are different jobs, and pretending otherwise is how applicants get hurt.

The writer is a current US physician resident, writing under the open pen name Alex Rowan. Nothing here comes from inside any residency program's selection process: no committee talk, no applicant information, no attending gossip. Public data and generic lived experience only. The pen name exists so the writing can stay independent of any institution; it is disclosed on every page for the same reason.

No fake urgency, no countdown theater beyond the real calendar, no purchased lists, no engagement tricks. The free tools are actually free. The weekly brief is three minutes because your attention is the scarcest thing you have in this season, and wasting it would break the only promise that matters.

That is the whole contract. The rest is just Wednesdays.

Alex