Let’s think about how we can maximize our chances of getting an interview and turn that into an acceptance! You’ve taken the MCAT, sent in your transcript, submitted your primary application and now it’s time for secondary applications. Secondary applications mainly consist of several smaller essays that are assigned by each individual school to learn more about you and whether you would make a good fit for their program.

Here are a few tips to rock your secondaries.

TIP 1 – Submit early

Once you have submitted your primary application, then it goes through a review process and if schools find that your application meets their criteria, then you will go into the next phase. You will start receiving secondary essay applications.

Since most schools use rolling admissions, it is to your benefit to submit your secondary applications as early as possible. The earlier you submit, the more likely that spots will still be available for interviews. The more interviews you receive, the more chances you have of getting accepted into medical school.

If you are applying to 15+ schools and you then receive around 15 secondaries as well, this will result in a lot of writing and juggling of priorities. Schools will often give you around 1-2 weeks to submit your secondary essays. In order to make sure you don’t miss any deadlines and that you submit higher priority schools earlier, make use of an excel tracker.

I recommend you use a tracker to keep all of your due dates straight, along with being able to prioritize based on the school MCAT and GPA. You can also note down how many essays each application requires, what the essay subject is and the word count. This will allow you to have a big overview of all applications and see which essays have subject overlap.

If you want to download my secondary tracker template –> click here

TIP 2 – Pre-write your essays

You can make sure that you submit your secondary essays early and don’t get overwhelmed by multiple applications and deadlines if you start writing ahead of time. Once you submit your primary application you have around one month while it is getting processed and reviewed. Use this downtime to start writing your secondary essays.

You can find school-specific essay prompts from previous years online. There are several databases that will display past prompts, as well as current prompts. Here are three comprehensive resources. I recommend you look through them, decide which one provides you the most value, and stick to only one instead of jumping back and forth.

1. Medical School Headquarters Essay Library
2. Prospective Doctor Essay Prompt Database
3. Med School Insiders Secondary Prompts

Writing your secondary essays ahead of time allows you to save time later once you receive the official invitation. You can spend minimal time tweaking your responses rather than starting them from scratch. This allows you to prioritize submissions to your top choices. You do risk writing an essay for a school that may not invite you to submit a secondary application. In order to avoid this, make sure you focus on pre-writing answers to some of the most common essay prompts across all schools.

TIP 3 – Don’t start from zero every time

Once you have pre-written an essay for a common prompt, don’t start writing from scratch every single time. In order to save yourself time and stress, you should focus on this strategy: reduce, reuse, recycle.

One common prompt that can be seen across most secondary applications is the diversity and adversity question. You can start off by brainstorming a list of qualities that make you unique, diverse, or a list of hardships you have overcome. Then you can write a generic diversity/adversity essay and reuse and recycle for several schools. Of course, you will have to reduce the word count sometimes or modify it to fit the school mission statement.

Here is an example of the diversity prompt and how it can be introduced depending on the school:

Mayo Clinic

We are all unique in different ways. Explain how your personal diversity manifests in your personal and professional activities. (500 words)

New York University

The Admissions Committee uses a holistic approach to evaluate a wide range of student qualities and life experiences that are complementary to demonstrated academic excellence, strong interpersonal skills, and leadership potential. What unique qualities or experiences do you possess that would contribute specifically to the NYU School of Medicine community? (2500 characters)

You can see that both schools are asking for the same overarching theme and aim to learn about what you can bring with you to their school from your diverse background. Even though the wording may vary, they are both trying to learn more about your unique qualities and how they can contribute to their M.D. program. Your response to both these questions should be similar, accounting for slight variation in word count, and catering to school-specific missions and values.

TIP 4 – Build on your story

Your entire application should be like a story. Each component is a chapter, and when all the chapters come together they create your narrative. Up until this point, your transcript gives the admissions committee an insight on your academics, whether your GPA was stable, had an upward trend, or some other irregularities. Although your GPA and MCAT are important, they don’t fully reveal who you are and what you stand for.

The AMCAS application work and activities section along with your personal statement should serve to show the committee who you are, why you are dedicated to medicine, and what values and beliefs you stand for. These two components should complement each other and you secondary essays are the third component. Use these essays to further show the admissions committee your background and why you are a great fit for their program.

Every school has a different mission or value statement and your goal is to convey what you can bring through your experiences and how you strive to further the school mission. Let’s look at an example.

In their mission statement, Emory University emphasizes diverse students, innovative leaders, and biomedical research. So as you respond to their secondary essays, you may want to focus on conveying to the school how your experiences fall under these themes of diversity, innovation, and research.

Also, remember that this is a two-way fit. You want to try to fit into the school and get them to like you, but if the school values don’t align with your personal goals, then you shouldn’t force to fit in. If an institution has a mission statement that emphasizes primary care and rural medicine, but that doesn’t fit within your personal values and goals, then don’t try to necessarily force yourself to match their vision.

TIP 5 – Stand out from the crowd

This may or may not be obvious. But you need to find ways to make your secondary essays stand out. The admissions committee will probably end up reading hundreds or thousands of secondary essays and they will probably spend only a few minutes reading each essay. So put yourself in their perspective and think like an ad com. When you read an essay, what will make you intrigued? What will make you remember an applicant? What would you want to read?

Try to reflect on what other applicants might typically write about and make sure that you don’t write the same thing. If you write a secondary essay and you can replace your name with another person, and the essay will still work, then it’s probably not that memorable and unique to you. Let’s look at an example.

University of Chicago

Share with us a difficult or challenging situation you have encountered and how you dealt with it. In your response, identify both the coping skills you called upon to resolve the dilemma and the support person(s) from whom you sought advice. 

This is a common way that schools will ask the adversity and hardships question. Quite often, pre-med students will resort to answering this question by referring to poor academics. My suggestion would be to stray away from the common answer and dig deep within yourself to reflect on personal hardships you have faced in your life that may be unique only to you. You should not only share this challenge, but also show the committee how it impacted you, what you learned from it, or if it led to any internal transformation. The more personal you get, the more you can stand out.