Use all the free resources available to you from SDN: articles, guides, expert advising, forums discussions, and school research.
1) Succinctness is a communications skill.
www.studentdoctor.net
Looking at last year it was 9/2 when everyone posted on SDN
According to this spreadsheet, the post II acceptance rate is 38.43 (IS) & 37.02 (OOS) so congrats!
Here it is.
forums.studentdoctor.net
submitted the secondary 2 days after it came out. Don't remember "complete" date on the schools end
honestly not sure. didn't really check / keep track along the way.
StinkyToes let me get a whiff
Okay toastedbutterbiscuit you got me. I'll stay loyal as long as you don't tell her about my poor behavior on SDN
Lets goooo. You’re crushing it. When were you complete if you don’t mind me asking?
7/6!
I refreshed. after submitting survey and picture you need to refresh and go back to the main interview tab again
Time for me to start working on my LOIs lol
Got it to work! Thanks man
flexmed had me down tremendous for this school
Update: working for me now!
not me
Do you recommend sending a LOI pre-II? Sinai is def my #1 choice and would go there without hesitation
If you would truly go there without any hesitation and no matter what, I would wait until the first week of November or maybe even around Thanksgiving to send a very detailed letter of INTENT
So was your LOI just to express interest? Were you also gonna wait until then to send it (assuming no II but moot point now), or were you planning on sending it soonish?
Yeah I was going to write a letter of interest. I was thinking about sending my around mid October if I hadn't heard by then.
Ok cool. So I'll give it some time then 🙏 hopefully they don't go chronologically
Letter of intent means you intend to go there, that is your top choice. Think of it like early decision. Technically no letter is binding, but if you are sending a letter of intent you are basically saying you would go there no matter what. My understanding is it looks very bad and it's not a good idea to send a letter of intent and then not go if you get into that school. Be very careful with this one and only send it to your absolute top choice! Also, this is a much more powerful letter to send. If you are perhaps stuck on the wait list somewhere you really want to go. One of the schools I interviewed at say they only pull people off the wait list if they have sent them a letter.
These are terms created by applicants to describe the content of letters. I don't think admins are categorizing it in this way, and generally just read what you write and utilize your level of commitment to them to make a better decision.
This is false actually. Letter of intent versus letter of interest is something that schools do distinguish between. Especially if it is a school that explicitly says it is interested in communication from you.
I see, that's news to me that schools actually utilize this terminology. I'm not saying that schools don't distinguish between them, just that it's really the level of commitment you're expressing that matters. If you are 100% committed then go for it, but personally don't think you need to use the exact phrasing of "letter of intent".
In my opinion, the phrasing does matter. Also, the huge caveat here is that only certain schools value this kind of communication and you need to be careful. I know Mount Sinai, for example, values update letters, but I'm not sure if they necessarily value letters of intent or interest. Whereas, and I know this for a fact because I was told this in my interviews, a few other schools on my list explicitly say they enjoy and want to have communication from their students which include these types of letters. So you have to look into if the school you want to talk to even wants to hear from you and then decide what level of letter you want to send them.
