Prepping For Secondaries: What Should I Write?

Jul 30

July 30, 2018 - Abdi

Before you start stressing about secondaries, take a moment to be proud of yourself for just submitting your primary medical school application! The application you just submitted encompasses years of your life, not just the number of hours you spent on your personal statement. This is a huge accomplishment.

SECONDARY ESSAY PROMPTS DATABASE

Once you have taken your moment, you can begin seizing your opportunity to get ahead of the application cycle. The secondaries phase of the application cycle can very well be the most overwhelming, but by getting ahead and staying organized, you will set yourself up for success.

If you submit your primary application in early June, you will have about a month before you start receiving your earliest secondaries. Even if you submit your primary application in July, there will still be some time before you begin receiving secondaries. During this time, a great way to get ahead is by visiting this Secondary Essay Prompts Database.

On this website, you will find links for almost all medical schools that will take you to that school’s past secondary application questions. Please note, these are not completely exhaustive, meaning that there may be more questions in your actual secondary applications that did not make it on this list, especially if you apply to special programs that are not part of the general MD application. Another thing to note is that some schools’ secondary questions change, while others’ do not—multiple schools may even ask the same question! Either way, thinking about the questions asked in previous years will serve as a great starting point for your brainstorming.

BRAINSTORM!

Now that you have looked up secondary questions for the schools to which you applied, write! Write the very first things that come to mind. Do not worry about character limit or grammar or flow or syntax; just let your thoughts stream out! When you first get asked a question, that initial spark in your mind will probably evoke a feeling or thought you may not have felt before. Do not worry if it doesn’t initially sound “good enough.” Write those down! Seriously thinking about a difficult question can take a lot of energy from you, and it is much better to invest that energy now that you do not have deadlines nipping at your heels as opposed to later when you have two weeks to turn in multiple secondary applications (two weeks is the recommended time to turn in a secondary after you have been invited to complete it). After you write down your initial thoughts, then you can review what you have written and start polishing up your responses, condensing and elaborating as needed.

Two particular things to note as you go through these past secondary application questions are the specifics and the character/word limit of the prompts. Some schools ask very time-consuming questions that can take as much time (or more!) to write as your personal statement. For example, UC San Diego has a behemoth of a prompt instructing you to write an autobiography of yourself in 6,000 characters WITHOUT including info you already used in your personal statement. These types of prompts will take you a while to compose, but if you truly put in the effort ahead of time, you will set yourself up to compose a great response that you can later condense to answer other secondary questions–work smarter, not harder!

GET ORGANIZED

A great way to stay organized is by creating a Google Doc. Let each school you apply to have its own page or two (insert a page break after each school). Then, copy the secondary questions found on the website mentioned above and paste them onto your Google Doc under the respective school. If you find multiple schools asking the same/very similar secondary question, make note of it the second/third/fourth time you see it in your Google Doc so that you can condense or elaborate a previous response according to the potentially different character/word limit of that different school. The amount of questions is overwhelming enough—no need to answer the same question twice!

One very important thing to keep in mind is to be careful what you copy and paste. A terrible mistake you can make is forgetting to change the name of the school you talked about after copying and pasting a response. For example, if you wrote about Medical School X and how you will contribute to diversity at their school, and then saw the same prompt for Medical School Y, you may think “I can copy and paste my response I already wrote!” Great, this will save you time BUT DON’T FORGET TO CHANGE THE NAME OF THE SCHOOL!!

A great way to avoid this disaster is by highlighting the parts of your responses that are school-specific for all of your potential secondary application question. That way, if you copy and paste, the highlighted portion of your responses will catch your eye and you will be much less likely to forget to change the name of the school. Phew!

For information on how to organize your secondary responses, click here.

1) WHY DO YOU WANT TO COME TO OUR SCHOOL

The best way to approach this type of question is to do your research on the school’s website (or MSAR!). Look up the school’s mission, areas of student involvement, research opportunities, specialty rankings, etc. Since you are getting ahead, you can take your time and really dig deep to find something that truly appeals to you so that your response can be that much more meaningful.

For more information on how to answer the “Why Us” question, please click here.

2) HOW WILL YOU CONTRIBUTE TO DIVERSITY AT OUR SCHOOL?

This is a very “ugh” question, but ultimately it is asking what you find unique about yourself. Thinking about what makes you unique can be quite difficult if you’ve never thought about it before. Really think about your own idiosyncrasies: Why do you do certain things? What experiences in your life have made you learn something you would want others to learn? No matter how silly you may think some of these things are, write them down and go from there. This is your application so it should reflect who YOU are.

For more information on how to answer the “Diversity” question, please click here.

3) TELL US ABOUT A CHALLENGE YOU FACED AND HOW YOU GREW FROM IT

For this type of question, the growth and reflection part are what will result in a strong response. The challenge/situation itself is not as important as your growth from it. Take a moment to think about a few instances in your life where you learned something you feel is invaluable. Did a friend confide something very personal with you? Did you break your dominant hand and have to learn to use your other hand? You want your responses to be profound, so let the feelings come out as you brainstorm your heart out! Once you have transcribed these instances into words, you can see which challenge you want to go with that will showcase your growth the best.

For more information on how to answer the “Challenge/Adversity” question, please click here.

4) WHAT DID YOU DO WITH YOUR GAP YEAR (IF APPLICABLE)

Many applicants run into the dilemma of including a work/activity in their primary application that they just started. Fear not, a lot of secondary applications ask what you have done since graduation/submitting your primary application that you have not already talked about. This may also come in the form of “Is there anything else you would like us to know?”

The list goes on, but as you can see there are ways to approach each different type of question. However, what ultimately stays the same is the “why” and “how” part.

YOU GOT THIS!!

Whether or not you look at specific questions to help you brainstorm for the questions you will see on your secondaries, thinking about why you do literally everything in your life the way you do can stimulate some thoughts you may not have had to think about before. The in-depth nature of the responses you will compose can be difficult, but you can help yourself by getting ahead and coming up with responses while you do not have a pending deadline. Do yourself the favor and start writing down those thoughts in that wonderful head of yours!

Good luck!

Bridging Admissions