Now that many students have submitted their primary applications, it’s time to start prewriting secondary essays!
What are Secondary Essays?
Secondary essays are prompts that medical schools will send out after the AMCAS transmission date. Unlike the primary application essays, which are sent to all schools, secondary essays are additional essays you submit to that school only. They can range anywhere from just a few short questions, to several long essays.
Why is it important to start prewriting?
The common advice is for students to start prewriting secondary essays soon after they submit their primary applications (there is a period of time between primary submission date and when secondaries can start rolling in). The reason for that is simply because once secondaries start coming in, it could feel like a “flood” of essays you have to work on, and it can get overwhelming very quickly. In addition, another piece of advice is to submit secondaries within 2 weeks of receipt because medical school applications are often reviewed on a rolling basis. Prewriting, then, is simply so that you could get a head start. Oftentimes, you can find prompts from the previous years online, and students often start working on them as soon as they submit their primary applications.
My Advice
If pre-writing your secondaries school-by-school right now feels overwhelming to you, and you don’t know where to start or what to prioritize, then I would suggest that you first tackle the most common prompts that would come up again and again throughout your secondary applications. These themes are:
- Diversity
- Sample prompt: Yale School of Medicine values diversity in all its forms. How will your background and experiences contribute to this important focus of our institution and inform your future role as a physician?
- Adversity/Challenge
- Sample prompt: (Pittsburgh) Tell us about a challenging problem you faced and how you resolved it
- Leadership
- Sample prompt: (Columbia) Please describe your most meaningful leadership positions.
- “Why Us”/Why “X” School
- Sample prompt: Why have you chosen to apply to __________ School of Medicine?
- Gap year essay (if applicable to you)
- Sample Prompt: (UCLA) Did you experience or are you anticipating time between graduating from college and matriculating into medical school? If yes; Describe the activities in which you participated or are planning to participate. Examples include additional schooling, employment, or caring for a loved one.
- The COVID essay
- Sample prompt: (University of Alabama) Please describe if and how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected your preparation for applying to medical school.
When I was applying for medical school, I prioritized writing a 500 word essay for each of these “common” prompts–I made sure they were polished and ready to go before secondaries started coming in. You might be wondering why 500 words? Surely the word/character count differs on each of the essays! That’s true, but it allowed me to have a well-developed narrative that I can then trim down as I received my secondaries.
Of course, there’s still work involved even if you prewrite your secondaries in this way–sometimes the prompts are really short, or there is a variation on a common prompt—but what helped me was already having brainstormed and written the essay, so I know exactly what I wanted to talk about and exactly what I wanted my readers to leave the essay knowing about me.
In the coming days I will be writing some posts on advice tackling each of these common prompts! Best of luck to everyone.
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