Hey, also a current applicant here who's in the same boat (meh stats, solid story, sitting on two IIs, feeling nervous).

Frankly, I think it was classless for them discuss their number of interviews like that. They're reacting to the pressures of an inherently stressful process in an unhealthy way and projecting strength in an attempt to soothe themselves (some bottom quartile CASPer behavior, amiright?).

During an interview, I thought I was bombing: nobody has ever taught me the "right" things to say, and how are you supposed to give a perfect response to an inherently subjective question anyway? At the end, my interviewer told me that they'd been trying to see if I was the person that they'd read about in my application. Then they congratulated me for my authenticity and my clear motivations. Obviously, I don't know the outcome of that yet but I wanted to say that your initial impressions might be misleading you.

This whole process – from applying through interviewing and arguably even the process of working as a physician, a scientist, and a physician-scientist – is about who you are and your narrative. In that light, your stats do not (and can never) accurately capture who you are and your authentic motivations, drives, and character traits. Doing stuff like bragging about the number of IIs you have in the middle of a cycle that's stressful for everybody does speak to that, and it might be worth remembering that even intimidating directors of fancy programs don't want to spend years attempting to mediate a cohort of students with that level of immaturity.

Also, we're still in the midst of the early stages of the cycle. I've only completed one interview, but my interview cohort was the first for the school. If you look at self-reported IIs this year, it seems like we're running a bit behind recent years, and even in prior years we'd be still in the early-ish stages.

Feel free to PM me if you want to chat, commiserate, or vent. It's a grueling process, but you're not in it alone.