Med School Application Process

One day short of two months with no posts. The paucity of posts is explained by the fact that I have been busy between school, work, and applications. Here I'm going to give a basic rundown of the application process for med school.

Back in May I took the MCAT, which is the admission exam for medical school. The next step of the process was to fill out the primary application, which is a basic, centralized application for every school you want to apply to. You fill out personal information, all of the classes you have taken in college and grades from those classes, different activities you have participated in during college (service, research, etc), write a personal statement essay, and select all of the medical schools you would like to send the application to (~30 bucks a pop). You also must find several professors and supervisors to write letters of recommendation, which are associated with your application file. The application service takes about 30 days to verify your application and transcript.

Schools that are interested (either in you or just your money) send a request for you to fill out their particular secondary applications, different for every school. Some are fairly simple, but most require another handful of essays to be written. After filling out the secondary, you get to pay another 75 - 100 dollars each.

After they screen the secondaries, schools then contact you to set up a time for an interview at the school. Of course, you get to pay to fly yourself to the school and find yourself food and lodging for your time there. If you make it this far, you basically qualify for acceptance at the school--they're checking to see if you're a good fit.

Now you wait. And wait, and wait. Schools make their decision and contact you via email, letter or telephone. Their deadline for decisions is in April. Some may decide and let you know sooner. In the meantime, you put all of your plans for the future on hold, because you don't know where you'll be living for the next four years.

Next post will be about my experience thus far in the process.