Application Timeline

Timeline from Princeton Review

In this post I am going to give you the "ideal" timeline for applying to medical school - remember that everyone is different and you may need to alter this schedule in a way that is feasible for you 

I will briefly go over each step but will leave the in-depth details for blog posts on that specific step of applying! 

Okay that being said... here we go :) 

Before May 30th: 

1. Pick Your Schools

    - Use MSAR: this is a AAMC website that requires a membership ($28 for the year) but will give you invaluable information about the schools you are choosing between - most importantly their median MCAT and median GPA 

    - The average applicant applies to ~16 schools but to be completely transparent, I applied to 26

    - Keep in mind that every primary application you send out costs money ($140 for the first school and $40 for each additional school) 

    - When choosing schools a good rule of thumb is to apply to: 

                 - 25% "safety" schools: schools where you exceed both the median MCAT and GPA 

                 - 50% "in range" schools: where you meet the median MCAT/GPA or exceed in one stat but not the other 

                 - 25% "reach" schools: where you are slightly under in one or both of the statistics 

 - When picking schools you also want to be cognizant of your "soft" statistics - for example whether or not you fall into an underserved group, extracurriculars, and hometown 

                 - if you fall short on any extracurriculars category, are not from an underserved community, have no ties to the area, etc you may want to consider applying to more "safety" and "in range" schools than the previous percentages suggest 

                     - When building your list keep in mind that some schools (ex: UW) have a strong in-state preference and therefore may be considered a "reach" even if you meet their guidelines 

2. Write your Personal Statement

    - This is basically a "Why Medicine" 

    - I will give more detail about this in a later blog post 

3. Write out your Activities

     - For each activity you have 700 characters on your responsibilities, how you contributed, and what you learned from the experience 

    - For three of the activities you will get to deem them "Most Meaningful" and will get an extra 1300 characters to explain why they were the most meaningful (aka what they taught you) 

4. Take CASPer

    - This is an online ethical test that SOME medical schools require: research which schools do and make sure you send it to them 

   - More on CASPer in a later blog post 

Last week in June: Your primary application gets sent to schools and they can send you Secondaries 

    - Each school with send you a secondary application with it's own specific questions and ideally you should get them back in 2-4 weeks (again this is IDEAL) 
     - Each secondary costs $90-$130

    - Some schools screen before they send them out (aka have a GPA/MCAT cut off in place) and some send secondaries to everyone 

    - Ideally you will pre-write (as soon as you finish your primary app) some typical questions and use them to fit school-specific questions

   - Schools often use the same kinds of questions each year so you can go to SDN or Reddit to find past questions

September-April: Interviews

   - Interview invites will go out starting in August but will continue to go out through March 

   - For interviews you must fly to the school and do an in person interview 

  - Look forward to a whole post about the 2 kinds of interview formats medical schools use 

October 15th-May: Acceptances WOOHOO 

Thanks for reading and I hope that cleared up the crazy timeline that is applying to medical school!