Okay, you’ve submitted your primary application and have a plan for your ethics exams (if the schools you are applying to need them). Now what? While there’s not a required step per say, I cannot emphasize how helpful prewriting your secondaries is.
Let me backup for a second. What are secondaries? Secondaries are shorter additional prompts that medical schools will send you (kind of like the supplementary essays you had to write when applying to college). Most medical schools will send you secondaries (they’re not necessarily selective about it), but there are some schools like UCSF and UCSD that review your primary application before deciding who gets a secondary.
When schools send you their secondaries will vary, but you can expect to receive several schools’ secondaries simultaneously. Your goal should be to write the secondaries and submit them back to the school within 1 week or 2. Some schools have strict deadlines by which you need to submit the secondary back to them, but the sooner you do this, the sooner the admissions committee can review your application.
You receive your secondary invitations over email. While you submit your primary application through AMCAS, you submit your secondaries through each school’s applicant portal (and yes that means you have to keep track of several applicant portals which is kind of annoying and pay their separate secondary submission fees as well). Keep an eye on your email during “secondary season” and check your spam folder to ensure that you have completed all the secondaries you need to.
You might be thinking, how can I prewrite secondaries when I won’t know the prompts until schools send them to me. That’s a completely valid question, and the good news is that year after year some elements of secondaries stay the same (and sometimes schools reuse the same prompts).
This is how I went about the prewriting stage:
A bulk of secondary pre-writing will be spent on this portion. Every year some medical schools have slightly different secondary prompts (but several keep theirs the same year after year so you can actually pre-write them).
What I did was create several documents which had five schools each on them on Google Drive. I then pasted in the prompts for schools based on online research (if you search up prompts for a specific school from the past application cycle you will find it online). I tried to prioritize prompts from schools that were a) known to keep their prompts the same, b) known to have strict turn around deadlines for the prompts, and c) had unusually long prompts.
While this process is arduous, you really do yourself SUCH a favor later on when it comes to actually filling out your secondaries. I also was pleasantly surprised to find that I used so much of my Part 1 brainstorming to do this portion of the secondary prewriting. It’s worth it to keep pre-writing until you start receiving secondaries.
I spent July, August, and September working on my secondaries (keeping track of them on an Excel sheet which I cannot recommend enough because there are times when you are working on six schools in the same week). I found that most schools reused prompts from the previous years so my prewriting could allow me to copy and paste directly.
In the beginning (July), I felt energized and ready to do my secondaries. However, by the second month, I was feeling burnt out. It felt like I was just writing all the time, and I didn’t want to. In those moments I would take breaks and sometimes not write for days. I found that I was more efficient and my writing quality was a lot better when I felt energized. All this to say, secondary writing is a marathon and not a sprint. Yes, you should try to get them done quickly, but you should select a pace that is sustainable for you.
Making a schedule and keeping track of secondaries helped me stay organized throughout this somewhat chaotic process. Also it really helped that one of my friends was also writing secondaries at the same time as me because we would go to the library and just spend hours writing together!