Congratulations. You’ve decided to embark on probably one of the most expensive, time-consuming journeys of your life—the journey of applying to med school, which, arguably, can feel just as intensive as med school itself. 

The MCAT, the Primary Application, the Secondary Application, and the Interview add together to what can often be a huge headache. Despite this, somehow, over 20,000 people enroll in medical school every year. This guide offers resources and approaches to help you maximize your chances that you’re one of the 20,000.

Becoming a doctor (and, subsequently, applying to medical school) should be a slow, deliberate process. Embarking on the longest educational journey needs to be done with commitment and certainty. This guide does not encourage the haphazard writing of essays at the last minute. If a medical school application is a fine chardonnay, this guide is the decades-old oak barrel that will add complexity—but only with patience and precision.

Putting it All Together

To grasp the application in all its complexity, we encourage you to think about the application as a whole. While this guide will focus on each component of the application, it will also push you to think about how the short responses in the Work and Activities section will complement your Personal Comments or Secondary supplemental essays. No part of the application acts independently. As you build a personal narrative, each component builds upon the previous. 

An admissions officer will read each section in relation to the others with two questions in mind. First, is this person qualified? And second, does this person truly want to become a doctor? Everything you write should be in the service of assuring the reader these things. In the process of writing, you may encounter self-doubt and insecurity. As with any life-altering decision, these misgivings are healthy and normal, so long as your enthusiasm outweighs your doubts most of the time.

The Application Itself

In general, this guide encourages you to begin with an overall vision. Then, we encourage you to consider how that vision applies to each component of the application. We’ll talk in big-picture terms first, then get into the nitty-gritty details, and this introductory section is no different. We’ve briefly discussed the whole application, but we also have to consider the timeline of each component of the application. In general, the process is as follows: 

1. The Primary Application is the main component of the application, which this guide focuses on the most. It contains the 5300-character Personal Comment (which we’ll focus on in Section 7) along with your Work & Activities section. You’ll also send along your MCAT scores, transcripts, and letters of recommendation. For schools like the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) that screen applications (which these days is rare, as application fees make up a disproportionate amount of admissions office budgets), this will be the main body of information admissions offices use to judge the quality of an application. For schools that don’t screen Primary Applications, this will only be a portion of the body of information used to judge your fitness to advance to the next round. Because applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, it’s best to get this in as early as possible, usually in June.

2. For schools that screen Primary Applications, if your Primary Application is sufficient, you will then be invited to submit a Secondary Application and pay another application fee. For schools that don’t screen Primary Applications, you will automatically be invited to submit a Secondary Application (which you should submit as early as possible without sacrificing quality, usually around July) and pay another application fee. The Admissions Committee will then read your Primary Application—containing your Personal Comment essay, Work & Activities section, MCAT scores, transcripts, and letters of recommendation—along with your Secondary Application, which generally consists of short answer essays on more specific topics. When you’ve passed that round, you’ll then be invited to interview.

3. The Interview is the last round, which generally occurs from early fall until late December, where you’ll have to fly out (or, perhaps even post-COVID, Zoom into) a school where members of the Admissions Committee will interview you. If you’re personable and make an impression, you’ll then be accepted to the school, where you’ll be allowed to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education to take on the burden of caring for people and saving the world.

The application is a lengthy process and shouldn’t be taken lightly. It’s for people who truly want to be doctors, who have thought about this for years, who have made sure to seek experiences that confirm the validity of their desires. This guide will complement the long, hard work of deciding to become a doctor. It will not replace the hours of contemplation and deep experiences you should undertake before considering applying.

This guide will first further probe the Medical School Application, considering the audience and the narrative approaches necessary to craft compelling Primary and Secondary applications. Then, it will examine the planning, writing, and editing of essays for an imaginary person who is applying to the Top 10 Medical Schools. While we will examine the Secondary essays for Top 10 Medical Schools, the approach of grouping and planning can apply to any med school list. Scrutinizing the relationships between types of Secondary essays enables us to craft an organizational method to tackle all the required essays strategically and efficiently. 

Prompts, particularly school-specific ones, can be misleading in terms of the amount of work and the types of specificity they require. This guide will ensure that you have a compelling set of essay topics and are not doing unnecessary or unproductive work. 

Now, let’s begin.

Further Resources on Application Steps Not Covered by This Guide

Interviews

https://ocs.fas.harvard.edu/medical-interview

https://students-residents.aamc.org/applying-medical-school/ask-the-experts/ask-experts-preparing-med-school-interviews/

https://www.princetonreview.com/med-school-advice/medical-school-interview-questions

MCAT

https://students-residents.aamc.org/applying-medical-school/taking-mcat-exam/prepare-mcat-exam/

https://students-residents.aamc.org/applying-medical-school/taking-mcat-exam/how-i-prepared-mcat-exam/

https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat

https://www.princetonreview.com/med-school-advice/mcat-study-guide/mcat-study-timeline