2025-2026 Case Western Reserve

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chilly_md

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2025-2026 Case Secondary Prompts

1. Greatest Challenge: The Admissions Committee is interested in gaining more insight into you as a person. Please describe a significant personal challenge you have faced, one which you feel has helped to shape you as a person. Examples may include a moral or ethical dilemma, a situation of personal adversity, or a hurdle in your life that you worked hard to overcome. Please include how you got through the experience, how you handled the uncertainty or stress, and what you learned about yourself as a result. (2,000 character limit)

2. Personal Growth: Based on your current maturity and wisdom, reflect upon an experience from the past few years that you would handle differently today. (1,000 character limit)

3. Context of Care: Social and structural factors can influence health outcomes and impact how healthcare is delivered within communities. Briefly describe an experience that has broadened your perspective or increased your understanding of people whose life experiences, backgrounds, or circumstances may differ from your own. How did this experience shape your views on health, healthcare access, and/or healthcare delivery? (1,500 character limit)

4. Gap Year(s) if applicable: If you will have a time gap between college graduation and medical school matriculation, please tell us why you made this decision and what you will be doing or have done during this time. (1,000 character limit)

Optional Responses:

1. Research/Scholarly Work: One of the four pillars of the Western Reserve2 Curriculum is Research and Scholarship. Although research is not a prerequisite requirement for the University Program, if you have participated in research or other scholarly project (capstone project, honors thesis, etc.), please reflect on the experience, including how you learned from it, what challenged you, and how it may have impacted you educationally and professionally. If you have not completed research or scholarly project, please indicate that in the text box below. (2,500 character limit)
  • If the details of your project are included elsewhere in your application no need to repeat them here. We are interested in learning what you took away from the experience(s).
  • If you are applying to both the University Program and the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Program, the research response will default to the Lerner College Program required response.
2. Additional Information Response: Is there any further information that you wish to share with the Admissions Committee that may not be captured in the rest of your application? (2,000 character limit)


Good luck to all applying!

Interview Feedback:

 
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Upcoming informational sessions:
  • CWRU School of Medicine MD Programs:
    • May 14, 2025 at 7:00-8:00 pm EST - Register
  • Application Tips and Insight:
    • May 22, 2025 at 4:00-5:00 pm EST - Register
Details and registration links for these sessions can also be found on the admissions website: case.edu/medicine/md/admission
 
anyone get secondaries?
no, but this is from their website: "Throughout the week of July 15th, secondary application invitations will be emailed to CWRU applicants with a verified AMCAS application and an MCAT score of greater than or equal to 495." july 15th is a tuesday and the page hasn't been updated since last year, so i assume for this year it'll be the week of july 14th
 
Hey team - Our secondary application will start rolling out over the course of next week (starting July 14th). While you wait, we've posted our essay prompts on our website. Secondary Application Questions | MD University Program | Case Western Reserve University
confused on the research/scholarly work essay from university program defaulting to the Lerner required essay... so we write it out as 2,500 characters, and then can we add an additional 1,000 characters for the Lerner essay?
 
confused on the research/scholarly work essay from university program defaulting to the Lerner required essay... so we write it out as 2,500 characters, and then can we add an additional 1,000 characters for the Lerner essay?
No, if you are applying to LCP and UP, you will be provided the essay research essay prompt for LCP which will then be seen by both UP and LCP.
 
+1 OOS,

I'm trying to put my optional additional info essay, but it seems like the character limit is 1725 instead of 2000, is that intentional, or am I doing something wrong?
 
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+1 OoS MD Secondary received on 7/16/25
Verified & app transmitted on 7/8/25
 
3. Context of Care: Social and structural factors can influence health outcomes and impact how healthcare is delivered within communities. Briefly describe an experience that has broadened your perspective or increased your understanding of people whose life experiences, backgrounds, or circumstances may differ from your own. How did this experience shape your views on health, healthcare access, and/or healthcare delivery? (1,500 character limit)
For this, are they looking for a patient/clinical experience or just a general experience?
 
For this, are they looking for a patient/clinical experience or just a general experience?
The prompt does not restrict the experience to healthcare experiences by my reading, though it does make the synthesis work you have to do a bit easier if you use a clinical example.

I talked about an experience helping underserved communities with tax prep and connected it to larger systems issues that involve health and healthcare. Then I brought it back to how it would impact how I practice as a clinician.

I have worked with patients that are different than me (because you only have to work one shift for that to happen) but difference wasn’t central to any of my really powerful clinical stories.
 
3. Context of Care: Social and structural factors can influence health outcomes and impact how healthcare is delivered within communities. Briefly describe an experience that has broadened your perspective or increased your understanding of people whose life experiences, backgrounds, or circumstances may differ from your own. How did this experience shape your views on health, healthcare access, and/or healthcare delivery? (1,500 character limit)
Should this experience be post-high school? I have an experience from middle school that follows this greatly, but I don't want to be knocked since it was so long ago
 
Should this experience be post-high school? I have an experience from middle school that follows this greatly, but I don't want to be knocked since it was so long ago
The prompt is trying to get at what populations you care about and how it will impact your practice of medicine.

In my opinion you could use the middle school story effectively if, and only if, you have subsequent recent experiences that are thematically aligned with the story and accrue to the above.
 
Should this experience be post-high school? I have an experience from middle school that follows this greatly, but I don't want to be knocked since it was so long ago
I would advise something more recent. Middle school is certainly too long ago in my opinion.
 
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