Built from a spreadsheet that worked

The cycle that taught us everything

Our founder applied anesthesiology with a solid-but-not-stellar Step 2 and a hand-built spreadsheet: program stats scraped from everywhere, signal strategy, interview prep tabs, post-interview brain dumps. Two lessons from that cycle became Carotid's foundation. First: prestige rank is not your personal probability — every one of his interviews came from programs ranked 52–131, none from the top 50, despite a score above several top-tier matched medians. Second: signals amplify you inside your competitive band — his gold and silver signals converted at many times the rate of unsignaled applications, but a gold at a prestige reach still bounced. Fit beats rank. Strategy beats volume.

What we believe

• Provenance or it doesn't ship. Every stat in Carotid carries its source and date. Where we don't have data, we say "no data yet" — missing beats fabricated.
• Your data is yours. Notes, vibes, rankings, and documents are architecturally unreachable by programs and never used to train models. Community statistics publish only as anonymized aggregates (n ≥ 10), only after Match Day.
• The applicant comes first. Programs join Carotid later, on terms that help applicants — claimed profiles that keep facts current, and post-Match feedback that makes interview seasons better for the next class.

Why "Carotid"?

The carotid artery is the lifeline to the brain — the vessel an anesthesiologist guards every day. It felt right for a tool meant to be the lifeline through the most consequential decision of medical training. (And yes, the logo is a vascular tree.)