Filling And Organizing Your Secondaries!

    Once you submit the primary AAMC application,  it takes 6 weeks for it to get verified. Once get the green light, your secondaries will start coming in. You will receive an e-mail with instructions, a deadline and a link to the website where you will be filling everything out. Beware of secondaries arriving before your AAMC is verified. Often these require around $100 fee (or another large number) and a week later, they reject you. It's how they earn money. If you feel you are qualified for that particular school and you want to run the risk, it's on you. But if you feel your numbers are a a little off from the required ones at that school, wait until someone else applies first and hear their story. You don't want to throw money down the drain that you can use for another school.
    Secondary applications are a more personalized application for each school. Some schools send secondaries to all of their applicants, but some schools are more select. There is no way of telling which school is more selective or not other than by word of mouth, so fill out all the ones you receive just to be safe. Secondaries become difficult to manage because they tend to arrive at different dates and have different deadlines, they are located all in different websites (unlike the primary AAMC) and you can't do them all in one sitting. Some of them just require some basic information and a an essay answering a specific question. However, many of them ask several short-essay questions that are more personal and harder to answer, such as "Write a 800 word statement that tells us who you are", "What do you think makes a good leader?", "Tell us about an experience in which you had to deal with a negligent team member"; others require you to read specific ethical articles and respond to them.
     The questions they ask you should be thought of carefully and proofread a few times as if it was your personal statement all over again. Their admissions people selected those questions for a reason. For example, when they ask you what it means to be a good leader, there is no one correct answer they want. Studies have proven that when most people answer this question they look for characteristics that they already have that they think makes them a good leader. Rarely does someone answer this question objectively. So the admissions people evaluate how you look at yourself as well as your leadership qualities all in one question. The answer you give is not as important as what can be learned from you in it.
    If you are taking classes and applying at the same time it can become overwhelming to manage everything. The secondaries, however, should be prioritized at this point. The sooner they are submitted, the sooner you are considered for an interview and potentially given a call. Waiting is the worst part of the process, the less of it you have to do, the less stressed you will be.
Here are a few management tips that will make your life easier:

1) Create a file/section in your e-mail just for med school e-mails. This will make it easier for you to find information you receive instead of fishing for it in among all your other e-mails.

2) In your calendar and/or agenda write  out all the deadlines for the secondaries as you receive them. This way you know which ones you should fill out first and will give you an idea of how you can balance school with the applications.

3) Also make a list of the fees each one requires. Make sure you have the money to pay for all of them. Fees vary from $25 to $150 depending on the school. If you received the Financial Assistance waiver for AAMC primary, most schools will honor it and waive the secondary fee as well.

4) Copy-paste the questions into a word document and answer them in your own time. This way: you can still fill them out if your Internet connection is down or if it fails, you can send them to other people for proofreading, and you can make sure all the changes are saved as you write them. Some of the pages expire if "inactive" for a certain amount of time, so if you click submit or save after that time has passed, you will lose everything you wrote.

5) Having your secondary in a word document will make it easier for you to keep count of the number of words/characters you are writing. All of the questions have a limit, but most of them don't count the words as you write them. You will find yourself having to cut out sentences and phrases or having to add more to reach the requirement.

6) Some of the questions will overlap or require a similar answer. If the secondaries are saved in your computer you can easily copy-paste, and adjust the answer to save you time.

7) Research each school before filling out the respective secondary app. Most of them will ask you why you want to attend that particular school or what can you contribute to their growth. Answer this question for -each school as if they are all your top choice, to-die-for-dream-school. If the answer sounds generic they won't believe you. Plus they are more likely to interview someone that is thrilled about attending their school.

Hope it helps. Keep calm and start writing!