Jacob Frenchman4th year BIOSC major and soon-to-be med student This week, I’ll be picking up where I left off with my first post and will be outlining the secondary application and interview process for the medical school application cycle and talking about my experiences with both. The Secondary Application. A secondary application is a school specific application. It is sent to the applicant after the school has received their primary. Some programs will screen applications prior to sending a secondary, but most don’t — instead sending a secondary to everybody who applied. Secondaries contain school specific demographic and program questions, and essays for the applicant to write. From my experience, the number of essays varied from 0 to 7. Secondary application season begins after the medical schools receive the primary application. For me, this began within 1-2 days of my application being verified, but the day I received each secondary varied based on the school. A good rule of thumb to follow is to submit a secondary in equal to or less than 14 days after receiving it. Some schools specifically stated this deadline, while most (from my experience) did not. Regardless, I found it beneficial to get the secondaries done within 2 weeks. This was challenging at the time and required some triage at the height of secondary season due to the volume I had received, but by the second week of August I was done. Throughout the process I had to write many essays on a variety of topics, such as “Challenge” essays, “Why this school” essays, and “Diversity” essays. Each school will have a unique take on their topics but staying true to your story and life will help you tackle these prompts. I also realized that as I wrote more, the quality of my writing improved, so I felt like some of my later writing was better than the writing at the beginning. Writing multiple drafts of secondaries helped me improve the quality to the best I could, and having a few trusted eyes read my work also ensured that the quality of my writing remained high and true to myself, despite writing burnout. Secondary burnout is real, but the secondary application is an important aspect of the whole application file reviewed by each program’s admissions committee. Thus, it is important to stave off burnout as best as possible by taking breaks, varying the location you write in, and still taking time for yourself so the best essays possible are submitted to each school. After the primary and secondary is completed, schools will begin reviewing applicant files and elect to (hopefully) interview the applicant! The Interview In this last section, I am going to briefly write down some interview tips that I found helpful. Mock interviewing helped me prepare for potential questions I would be asked and helped me work on my nerves and how I talked about myself. Surprisingly, I found that reflecting on my own life and learning to talk about myself and my story was very challenging. Mock interviewing helped a lot for this. A second thing that was very helpful for me was brainstorming a cohesive story to tell in response to the typical “tell me about yourself?” “Why medicine?” and “Why this school?” questions that may come up during interviews. For the “tell me about yourself?” and “why medicine?” questions, my answers were the same for each interview because they were my stories. But, for the “why this school?” question, I would do research on each program interviewing me and do a deep dive on their website and social media to help craft a real answer as to why I and the program were a great fit. Lastly, despite it being extremely awkward, I found that recording myself answering interview questions and then reviewing the recordings was extremely helpful in practicing my delivery, minimizing nervous ticks I didn’t know I had, and improving my confidence. A great piece of advice I received was: “You want to rehearse so much that you don’t sound like you rehearsed.” Again, like the advice I quoted in blog post 1, it’s vague—but it really is true. Well, this concludes my blog posts on my tips/tricks for the medical school application process. I hope you find this helpful and wish you tons of success on your own application journey!
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January 2022
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