Kathy,
There are 3 rounds of applications in the Med School admission process.
Round 1 aka Primaries- A centralized application service called AMCAS (American Medical College Application Service), collects your MCAT scores, your transcript and an essay. For $30 a school, you pick which ones you would like to apply to. They verify your grades and send all of your information off to the various medical schools. This process is on line, and starts on June 1. All but about 10 medical schools in the country use AMCAS (the Texas schools have their own application service). You MUST do this first round in order to go on to the second.
Round 2 aka Secondaries- Once receiving your AMCAS application, Medical Schools invite you to complete a secondary application. Secondaries always ask for letters of recommendation and more money ($50-100), and generally ask for another essay. Some are very involved and ask for 5 or 6 essays. Some schools screen the primaries and only invite some candidates to complete the secondary application. Other schools send secondaries to everyone. It depends on the school.
Round 3 aka Interview- After reading your primary and secondary application, the medical school then decides if you are worthy of an interview. If you are, they call or write you with a date they would like you to come to their school. You go, and spend the day touring the school and talking to professors, the admissions staff and students. After the interview you can get 1 of 3 decisions: Deny, Accept, or Wait List. Medical Schools generally have very long wait lists since they want to have a full class each year Also, many students hold more than one acceptance until May 15th, when they must decide on a school. Thus, at the end of the spring, there is a huge shuffle of students.
Whew! Sorry that was so long. It’s complicated.
I applied to 24 schools for the primary round, and have been invited to complete 7 secondaries so far! I got UC Irvine today
