The Application Process

Another topic I’d like to explain (or rather bore you with) before I start med school this fall is the application process. In a nutshell, the process is loooong. For those of you who aren’t familiar, most graduate school applications are due in December or January and you hear back around March. Med school, on the other hand, is shifted a few months earlier. The application process is essentially three steps. First is a standardized application, known as the AMCAS (American Medical College Application Service). This application can be sent to as many schools as you want, but you have to pay per school (which adds up really quickly). Second, med schools send you a secondary application if they “like” you based on your AMCAS. Now I say “like” because some schools take the AMCAS more seriously than others. These schools read it fairly thoroughly before they send out secondaries. Other schools, however, use this process (I believe) to make money because you have to pay again to submit a secondary application. The secondaries are school specific, meaning each secondary application looks different. For example, one of my secondaries asked about five questions that could have been answered in less than 20 words total, while another asked for fives essays that needed to be ~750 words each. Think about it a bit…these things take forever; not to mention you are filling them out right as classes are starting up again. I must admit though that we (and I include anyone applying to grad school here) are cleaver. Ask most applicants and they will tell you that you begin to find ways to make your essays “usable” for more than one application :) Third, if you “make the cut” academically and show potential to become a good clinician upon an initial review of your application, an admissions committee may invite you for an interview. Sometime after the interview (a week, a month, maybe even 3 months…its unpredictable!) applicants are told they are admitted, rejected, or placed on the waitlist.

The worst thing about this whole process is that the correspondence is so unpredictable. Once you submit your secondaries, it’s all out of your hands and the waiting game begins. This is the hardest part. Your fellow premed friends start hearing back about interviews and when you haven’t, you freak. You start to play that game I mentioned earlier: You rationalize why you haven’t heard back—Are my grades not good enough? Did I need to volunteer for 60 weeks instead of 52 at the clinic? Should I have majored in biology? It’s silly, but we worry away.

And then it comes. After days and months of checking your email every 10 minutes (purchasing the iPhone around this time was probably the worst thing I could have done to try to settle my anxiety), you finally get an email:

Dear Mr. Alexander Cortez,

The admissions committee would like to invite you for an interview.

And from there, everything changes—you’ve gotten an interview! You’ve joined the club….but just for now.