GPAs. MCATs. CARS. AACOMAS. AMCAS. PREview. The abbreviations and acronyms you need to wade through on your journey to medical school can seem endless. Here’s another one: the Computer-based Assessment for Sampling Personal Characteristics – Casper for short. This situational judgment test (SJT) is designed to assess core competencies related to social intelligence and professionalism,…
Med School Applications Kick Off: Ten Tips to Get You Through the Season
Getting ready to apply to medical school? This can be a hectic time as you try to stay on top of everything. Here are ten tips to help you hit the ground running: 1. Get cozy with AMCAS/AACOMAS. These two services – the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS) and the American Association of Colleges…
Should You Consider a Caribbean Medical School?
If the application season isn’t going as you’d hoped, your thoughts might be turning to alternative ways of advancing your medical education. Perhaps you’re thinking about retaking the MCAT, boosting your GPA with postbaccalaureate coursework, or spending a year in a clinical or research environment. Or you might be thinking about warm tropical breezes and…
A Strategic Guide for Applying to Medical School
When premed students contact us about guiding them through the medical school application process, many of their questions are related to timing. “When should I …?” is a frequent question starter. Although no one single answer applies to everyone, here are the guidelines we use when advising our medical school clients. When should I apply…
The Nine Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make on a Medical School Waitlist
“How bad is it, Doc?” Well, clients don’t quite ask me that. But, as they clutch their waitlist notification, they’re clearly feeling immense tension and anxiety, as though life itself hangs in the balance. Waitlisted applicants begin to wonder, “What does it all mean? What should I do? And when, oh when, will it end?”…
How to Defer a Medical School Acceptance
There’s a lot of misinformation out there about deferrals, so let’s review the facts. How medical school deferment works After you have received an acceptance to a medical school, you might be able to defer your scheduled start date by a year. In the best case scenario, you will be granted the deferral; in the…
When Will Medical Schools Give You an Answer?
Sadly, the frustrating fact is that there’s no rule governing how much time a medical school has to respond to your application. However, we’ll try to answer some of the big questions on med school applicants’ minds, including: I submitted my primary but haven’t received a secondary yet. Many schools send out secondaries as soon as…
Teamwork in Medical School Admissions: How to Show You’ve Got It
In this post: Why do medical schools value teamwork? When the Institute of Medicine Committee on Quality of Health Care in America published its 2000 report “To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System,” the authors attributed most medical errors to two key deficits: (1) a lack of communication and (2) dysfunctional teamwork. It…
How to Answer the AMCAS Other Impactful Experiences Question (Formerly the Statement of Disadvantage)
If you have experienced any form of severe hardship – at any time in your life – medical schools want to know. Prior to the 2023-2024 cycle, AMCAS allowed candidates to self-identify as a disadvantaged applicant because of social, economic, or educational circumstances. Aiming to leave behind the negative connotations of the term “disadvantaged,” this…
The AMCAS Primary “Deadline”
In just a few days, many of you will want to submit your medical school primary application. You’ve probably heard that you have to click “send” on the first day possible – which this year is May 28, 2024 – if you want your best shot. But just how true is that? The AMCAS primary…
How to Improve Your Experiences for Your Med School Reapplication
One factor that can seriously hurt your chances of getting accepted to med school is a lack of substantive, ongoing service experiences, both clinical and nonclinical. Community service is not just another hoop you need to jump through to get admitted to medical school. After asking admissions officers in 2021 to rank the relative importance…
2023-24 AMCAS Work and Activities Section: What to Include (With Examples)
The AMCAS Work and Activities section is where you can share all your awards, memberships, research, clinical experiences, paid employment, publications, leadership, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and – as of this year – advocacy and social justice efforts. You have a limit of 15 activities that you can include in the AMCAS application. The types…
Rejected from Medical School? Three Tips for a Stronger Reapplication
You worked your tail off as an undergrad to earn an amazing GPA, took MCAT review courses to get a high score, and engaged in many hours of clinical experience and community service, but you were still rejected from medical school! Where did you go wrong? How can you get it right next time? Three…
What Is a Good MCAT Score for Getting into Medical School?
You’ve spent months in an MCAT review course, taken practice test after practice test, and finally sat for the exam. Your results are in. Are they good enough to get you into your target medical school? Let’s take a look at what your scores mean. MCAT scores and your grades are weighted differently. The primary…
GPA Issues When Applying to Med School: What to do With a “W”
Almost everybody has a blemish on their GPA. Usually it’s a failed class or a semester of poor grades. But there’s also the issue of how a “W” on your transcript will affect your chance of admission to medical school. The truth is that withdrawing from one or two classes is not going to hurt…
13 Essential Do’s and Don’ts for Your Residency Personal Statement
Residency applicants can submit applications via ERAS (Electronic Residency Application Service) starting September 7th. Don’t wait until the last minute – get cracking on those residency essays now! Why is your residency essay so important? Your personal statement is a vital part of your residency application; it’s where you’ll explain why you’ve chosen your specialty…
How to Write the “Why This Medical School” Secondary Essay
One of the most popular secondary questions asked by medical schools is “why our program?” Saying why you’re attracted to a particular school can be a hard thing to explain, especially when you’ve looked at so many programs that they’ve all begun to blur. I think that’s why I so often see the same answer:…
Matching Your Values to a Medical School’s Mission Statement
We cannot stress enough how important it is to understand and think about a medical school’s mission statement when you are applying. Successful applicants not only demonstrate that they have the essential qualifications a particular school wants, but they also prove that their interests and values align closely with those of the school. Why are…
7 To-Dos for Canadians Applying to U.S. Med Schools
Each year, Canadian medical school hopefuls look across the border for their medical education. While there are obvious challenges (adapting to a different health care system, returning to a Canadian residency, and much higher education costs), the higher acceptance rates at U.S. programs (about 36.2% overall per AAMC, as compared to around 19.6% in Canada)…
Reapplying to Medical School: Secondaries, Interviews and School Selection
In this final part of your assessment, we will look at all the other ways you communicated with the admissions committee. With the multi-staged admissions process, and an increasingly longer application season, applicants have multiple opportunities to make an impact – or be weeded out. Therefore, it’s important to evaluate whether or not your interactions…