#amcas

Hi premedblr:

AMCAS season has swung into full gear, so I’d like to share some useful tips that can be easily overlooked by medical school applicants. Feel free to message with any questions!

You do not need to submit your primary on Day 1 to be at the front of the secondary wave.

AMCAS does not transmit primary applications to your chosen schools until around late June, and schools cannot send applicants secondaries before a certain date (usually July 1). 

Primary applications submitted within the first 10-14 days of the application cycle should be verified within 2 weeks or so, meaning if you get your primary in before mid-June, your schools should receive your app before they start sending secondaries.

You must still submit your primary early.

As the summer progresses, the backlog of applications awaiting verification increases, and thus the verification time will steadily increase from 2 weeks to as high as ~6 weeks. Applications sent later than late June will encounter a high waiting time for verification. If you do not plan accordingly, this additional time will become a detriment to your interview and acceptance chances. For applicants who submit their primary later than June, it is highly recommended that you pre-write your secondaries to remain competitive (see my next post on the AMCAS secondary for information on what this entails.)

Proofread your application.

The only things that can be changed once you submit are the addition of new MCAT scores and letters of recommendation. Typos, etc. cannot be undone once you submit!

All undergraduate grades MUST be entered, and entered correctly.

Whether you transferred, took college classes in high school, even studied abroad, even if you took one summer school class at a some other college. You must send ALL grades and have transcripts for ALL institutions. Failure will have your primary application returned, which will be a disaster for your timeline. 

You do not need to have received your latest MCAT score to submit.

Verification, however, does not require your MCAT score(s) to be in. The vast majority of schools do not look at your scores until after you submit your secondary. Once your latest score comes into AMCAS, you can update your primary and have the score automatically transmitted to your chosen schools. So if you are waiting on a score, submit anyways. This is important to keep in mind when you consider the following point:

To verify, you only need to choose one school to apply to.

Say you’ve taken your MCAT, and are waiting on your score to get a sense of what schools will be within your range via the MSAR. This is common, and okay. Pick one school (that doesn’t pre-screen) and wait until you get your score to pick the rest. This is a useful method to account for the rare schools that do pre-screen; you can leave them out until your latest MCAT score comes in.

You do not need to have received all of your letters of recommendation to submit your primary either.

Noticing a trend here? There’s a reason for that, and it is this:

Most schools will not decide on an interview until everything is in.

It is helpful to know this now. Many schools will not assess your application until they receive the entire package: AMCAS primary, your secondaries, your MCAT, and all your letters of recommendation. So if you’re missing something, do not panic, and do not wait. Submit your primary anyways, and aim to have everything onboard by the time your application is verified. 

2017 US Medical School Application Timeline

Hope you all find this helpful! Good luck chickadees! My inbox is always open if you have questions!

Homegirl is up to four interview invites! Hell yeah!

SUNY Upstate

Geisinger

Rutgers NJMS

With AMCAS application season in full swing it has me thinking about how expensive it can be to embark on this journey to medical school #premedproblems 

You can officially kick off your 2018 medical school application as of June 1st at 9:30am ET!

Good luck everyone!

More info from AAMC here:

I am the president of an organization who hosted some premeds from a nearby university for a tour of the medical school. Most of them were juniors so they were gearing up to take the MCAT and open up AMCAS. I started this tumblr in 2013, the summer right after I graduated. I had some other premeds to talk to about applying but I didn’t really seek out to ask questions because I was already embarrassed that I didn’t have a set plan. Most of my information was from tumblr, SDN, and reddit. 

The premeds had so many questions about what it was like to be a medical student, what should they be doing in undergrad to help them prepare for med school/applying, how much do we study per day, ect. 

I think most of them are thinking of doing a gap year. The couple of students I spoke to the most were ones who had to take the MCAT again or are planning to do a gap year (not by choice). They were worried about being older than their class or what it looks like to admissions that they didn’t go straight through. That they felt weird about their classmates already had acceptance letters in hand. I am the perfect person to answer these questions because I’ve been through all that. 

Maybe this advice may help y’all also. I told them that the time is going to pass anyways so might as well do something you think you love. It’s much better to take a gap year or 2 so you can apply just once and get in on the first shot instead of being like “we’ll see what happens.” I burned myself with the “we’ll see what happens” when I took the MCAT without studying and way too soon. I made sure to tell them that there’s no shame in applying DO because it’s not worth it to spend another year reapplying because you didn’t get in anywhere. As long as you are productive during your gap years, they will not be looked at as a negative ex still shadowing, volunteering, studying for MCAT, doing research, working to save up money for med school. I talked about my AMCAS and how important it is to have an interesting personal statement and to only list meaningful activities that they can speak intelligently on. Not just randomly doing habitat for humanity for 1 hour once.

A couple years ago, there was a long stretch of time where I thought I wasn’t good enough to get into medical school. But I’m thriving here now. I love my school. I still think that getting into medical school is harder than staying in, but I think most people disagree with me there.

The dean of admissions was also a part of our tour. He was actually my last interviewer. He remembered what we actually talked about, which was research I did in undergrad and that I’m first generation Vietnamese. I didn’t think that I made that much of an impression but I made it thus far.

The last bit of advice I gave the students was that you don’t need a fancy facility to be at. You just need supportive administration, solid lecturers that are clinically oriented, a place that really emphasizes step 1, non mandatory lectures that are recorded, an internet connection, and a university affiliated hospital. Even better if it’s in state MD tuition and if there’s an abundance of research opportunities.