Are school's secondaries the same every year?

[RecyclingBinh]

Is it? I noticed a lot of people post up prompts for secondaries but don't know if it will be the same for this year's cycle. Please let me know.

Is there anyway to write your secondaries in advance?

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[RySerr21]

Is it? I noticed a lot of people post up prompts for secondaries but don't know if it will be the same for this year's cycle. Please let me know.

Is there anyway to write your secondaries in advance?

Yes and yes. Many schools will recycle the same secondaries yaer after yaer, some with minor variations. They can change them whenever they want, but for the most part they stay the same. You can definitely start working on them early if you want, just know that there is always a chance its not the same one.

 

[atomi]

Is it? I noticed a lot of people post up prompts for secondaries but don't know if it will be the same for this year's cycle. Please let me know.

Is there anyway to write your secondaries in advance?

With the exception of Duke's secondary, there is no point in doing them in advance. I did all of mine in less than 2 hours each with some taking less than 10 minutes. They aren't that bad!

 

[WashMe]

Hypothetically, if I have to reapply should I just recycle my exact same secondary essays if they got me invites this year? It would save time/effort and maybe allow me to get my apps in faster.

 

[RecyclingBinh]

How will a secondary affect your chance for an interview if you don't put time and effort into writing it? Will it matter more than the PS?

I will apply to a lot of schools and want to spend the least amount of time on each one but not where the essay is bad.

 

[fizzle]

Of all the schools I re-applied to, UC Davis' secondary essays were completely different. Other than that, all the others were the same.

 

[RecyclingBinh]

ok thanks all. i will go through the threads and look at the secondary prompts. hopefully i could get them done by May.

Will it matter much if you have grammar and errors in your secondary essay?

 

[235009]

be careful! secondaries DO change. for instance rosalind franklin completely changed their secondary from last year. i'm glad i didn't actually write an essay for their old prompt before they sent me the secondary. there are questions you will see over and over again though so that is a good place to start and will save you time later.

With the exception of Duke's secondary, there is no point in doing them in advance. I did all of mine in less than 2 hours each with some taking less than 10 minutes. They aren't that bad!

well aren't you special.

some of us however aren't as skilled as you are....for some secondaries i spent close to 10 hours spread over multiple days trying to craft the perfect answer. everyone has a different style but just keep in mind that you should usually be turning them around in about 2 weeks.

How will a secondary affect your chance for an interview if you don't put time and effort into writing it? Will it matter more than the PS?

I will apply to a lot of schools and want to spend the least amount of time on each one but not where the essay is bad.

i would say that for some schools your secondary essays are looked at as closely as your PS. there are schools without any secondary essays so i think this really varries. however if they are asking you to write an essay they will obviously be using that essay to assess something about you as a candidate so you should take it seriously. It is probably a better idea to apply to fewer schools and have stronger secondary essays than to send garbage to 50 schools. Also again, keep in mind that several won't have any essays and many essays are duplicated so that lessens the burden considerably.

hopefully i could get them done by May.

Will it matter much if you have grammar and errors in your secondary essay?

i dont think you need to start on your secondaries that early....if you can get your PS done by may then you're ahead of the game. of course grammar and errors in your secondary essay will look horrible and would matter a whole lot as is the case with anything you write for the purpose of making the case for your candidacy

 

[RySerr21]

ok thanks all. i will go through the threads and look at the secondary prompts. hopefully i could get them done by May.

Will it matter much if you have grammar and errors in your secondary essay?

dude, you are applying to medical school. competing with the best and the brightest students in the nation. You want your application to be as perfect as possible. What kind of impression do you think that will make on the adcoms when they read your secondary essay and find that you didnt care enough to proof read your essay for grammar and errors?

How will a secondary affect your chance for an interview if you don't put time and effort into writing it? Will it matter more than the PS?

I will apply to a lot of schools and want to spend the least amount of time on each one but not where the essay is bad.

if you are thinking of coasting through the app process w/o much time and effort.... save yourself some money and do not apply. Every part of the application is important. You have konw way of knowing which essay is the most, so just do your best on all of them. Take time to think of meaningful, intelligent answers (even if you think its a stupid question), and then proof read it when you are done. This is a reaaaaaaaally long process and you are gonna need to put in 100% effort for every step of the way.

Of all the schools I re-applied to, UC Davis' secondary essays were completely different. Other than that, all the others were the same.

Duke asks some of the most random ****. They had 5-6 essay questions and i dont think one overlapped with ANY other question I had ever seen.

 

[enjoydrywax]

well aren't you special.

some of us however aren't as skilled as you are....for some secondaries i spent close to 10 hours spread over multiple days trying to craft the perfect answer. everyone has a different style but just keep in mind that you should usually be turning them around in about 2 weeks.



i would say that for some schools your secondary essays are looked at as closely as your PS. there are schools without any secondary essays so i think this really varries. however if they are asking you to write an essay they will obviously be using that essay to assess something about you as a candidate so you should take it seriously. It is probably a better idea to apply to fewer schools and have stronger secondary essays than to send garbage to 50 schools. Also again, keep in mind that several won't have any essays and many essays are duplicated so that lessens the burden considerably.

*breathe*



Dude he was totally correct, at most those secondary essays (with the except of a few autobiographies from some schools) took roughly 10 minutes to 2 hours to complete. Honestly if you are spending more time on them you are probably over thinking it and writing some flowery BS that the adcoms will see straight through.

And honestly I don't think they hold much weight at all. Never in any of my interviews has anything I have written on a secondary essay been brought up, and they must not hold weight because I put in roughly one-thousandth the effort I put into my PS.

You will quickly realize that with 20+ secondaries on your back (assuming you apply to this many schools) you won't have the time or motivation to check and recheck your responses and I guarantee you whoever you have reading your essays will get mighty tired of reading them. You will fall into a pattern of cutting and pasting sentences from different essays to form the answer to a slightly different but ultimately similar question posed by a different secondary.

If you find yourself in that position, don't worry, you're right where you are supposed to be and you will float on all right.

 

[Excelsius]

*breathe*



Dude he was totally correct, at most those secondary essays (with the except of a few autobiographies from some schools) took roughly 10 minutes to 2 hours to complete. Honestly if you are spending more time on them you are probably over thinking it and writing some flowery BS that the adcoms will see straight through.

And honestly I don't think they hold much weight at all. Never in any of my interviews has anything I have written on a secondary essay been brought up, and they must not hold weight because I put in roughly one-thousandth the effort I put into my PS.

You will quickly realize that with 20+ secondaries on your back (assuming you apply to this many schools) you won't have the time or motivation to check and recheck your responses and I guarantee you whoever you have reading your essays will get mighty tired of reading them. You will fall into a pattern of cutting and pasting sentences from different essays to form the answer to a slightly different but ultimately similar question posed by a different secondary.

If you find yourself in that position, don't worry, you're right where you are supposed to be and you will float on all right.

It could take you 10 minutes or 10 hours to write. Doesn't matter. It's all about quality. Some secondaries are good enough to warrant an interview even for the weakest applicant and others are bad enough to get you rejected with perfect scores. Hint: The best writers usually take much longer to write something because they are often unhappy even with their best work and keep editing to the bitter end.

Secondaries may be time consuming, especially if you are applying to 30+ schools, but you can use SDN to prepare for them the summer before you apply. There are a few schools that change their secondary, but it doesn't hurt to write the essays anyway. Because of the large overlap of ideas, you will end up using pretty much everything you write. It's almost like all secondaries have a main theme to them. They are trying to find out who you are as a person and how suitable will you be to medicine.

 

[235009]

*breathe*



Dude he was totally correct, at most those secondary essays (with the except of a few autobiographies from some schools) took roughly 10 minutes to 2 hours to complete. Honestly if you are spending more time on them you are probably over thinking it and writing some flowery BS that the adcoms will see straight through.

And honestly I don't think they hold much weight at all. Never in any of my interviews has anything I have written on a secondary essay been brought up, and they must not hold weight because I put in roughly one-thousandth the effort I put into my PS.

You will quickly realize that with 20+ secondaries on your back (assuming you apply to this many schools) you won't have the time or motivation to check and recheck your responses and I guarantee you whoever you have reading your essays will get mighty tired of reading them. You will fall into a pattern of cutting and pasting sentences from different essays to form the answer to a slightly different but ultimately similar question posed by a different secondary.

If you find yourself in that position, don't worry, you're right where you are supposed to be and you will float on all right.

it takes alot less time to write BS than to write a well thought out and meaningful essay. of course if you have excellent numbers and plan on just coasting on those then your essays aren't going to hold too much weight but if you have marginal stats or some other weakness in your application it is a good opportunity to present yourself in the best possible light. As you hear in other threads your "story" really matters and the secondaries are another opportunity to tell yours convincingly. i'd be interested to see how you did after blowing off your secondaries. or maybe you didn't blow them off an think that saying they didn't take you much time makes you sound cool.

for some secondaries it took me like an hour just to try and fit my response within the character limit.

 

[funkymunkytoes]

If they are the same, I suggest you be enamored with the idea of attending Duke, because their secondary application is absolutely grotesque. I believe I wrote 6, lengthy essays for them (none of their essays had an upper limit word count), and although it resulted in an interview, the admissions office people said they never had seen such a falling off of students who sent their primary to them but never sent a secondary. It looks like a clever, ostensible way to weed out the I-really-want-to-attend-Duke types from the my-GPA-and-MCAT-match-up-and-they-are-a-top-10-school types. Try again Duke, because they were many fellow interviewees at my interview who wouldn't stop nagging about the pretentiousness of Duke students, why did they even apply, I wondered. I guess 6 lenghty essays falls short of weeding out the insincere types from those with an earnest desire to go to Duke. If the secondary is the same, good luck writing 12 total pages about personal dilemmas, why medicine, why Duke, volunteer experiences, &c., ad nauseum. In the end, I think it was worth it though!

 

[enjoydrywax]

it takes alot less time to write BS than to write a well thought out and meaningful essay. of course if you have excellent numbers and plan on just coasting on those then your essays aren't going to hold too much weight but if you have marginal stats or some other weakness in your application it is a good opportunity to present yourself in the best possible light. As you hear in other threads your "story" really matters and the secondaries are another opportunity to tell yours convincingly. i'd be interested to see how you did after blowing off your secondaries. or maybe you didn't blow them off an think that saying they didn't take you much time makes you sound cool.

for some secondaries it took me like an hour just to try and fit my response within the character limit.

You do bring up a few good points and they both apply to me. I had a very good "story" and the fact that it was my own story made it ridiculously easy to write about. As for "convincingly" I don't know how that adds a significant amount of time to writing a few paragraphs, but like I said it was my own story so I had an intimate knowledge of every aspect. Secondly, you are also right about the marginal stats; I'd say I had higher numbers (3.9, 39) than most applicants so yea maybe that's what gave me the confidence to not care so much on my essays. If you're still interested in how I am doing I'll let you know that this application cycle is working out really well for me.

I do however stand by my point that if you're spending more than an hour trying to fit your two paragraphs within the 500 word limit then you are needlessly obsessing over details that will have no meaning to any adcom that reads your essay.

 

[funkymunkytoes]

The average rate for computer transcription is 33 words per minute.[1]

From experience, the average secondary application essay is about 500 words. The average secondary application also has about 2 essays, giving us a total of 1000 words per secondary application.

Given that we grew up in the computer age, and that people religiously using SDN probably type faster than average, I'll make the conservative estimation that SDNers type at a rate of 50 words per minute.

Since the secondary applications require very little thought, though thought nonetheless, I'll knock the average transcription rate down to 30 wpm. That is a full 20 words per minute devoted to thinking, bull****ting, dazzling, thesaurusing, lying, embellishing, &c. If you type any slower than the said 30 wpm because of the thought aspect, you are just plain stupid. Caribbean, maybe?

So, 1000 words divided by 30 words per minute gives us 33.333 minutes devoted to each secondary application.

If a student applies to 20 schools, receives 15 secondary application requests, and doesn't regurgitate or recycle any of his/her essays, it should take the student a mere 500 minutes to complete the secondary applications, or 8.333 hours. Since most students spread the secondary applications over a month (or more), the student will spend approximately 17 minutes per day for one month completing all 15 applications.

Note: most students do not complete 15 secondaries, and most students do recycle essays. Since about one in every two secondary essay is roughly the same prompt, the student is essentially spending half the time writing the essays, or a grand total of 8.5 minutes per day. It takes me more than 8.5 minutes to take a crap.


In conclusion, secondary applications should not be given anything more than a quick thought!



1. Karat, C.M., Halverson, C., Horn, D. and Karat, J. (1999), Patterns of entry and correction in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems, CHI 99 Conference Proceedings, 568–575.

 

[235009]

Secondly, you are also right about the marginal stats; I'd say I had higher numbers (3.9, 39) than most applicants so yea maybe that's what gave me the confidence to not care so much on my essays. If you're still interested in how I am doing I'll let you know that this application cycle is working out really well for me.

I do however stand by my point that if you're spending more than an hour trying to fit your two paragraphs within the 500 word limit then you are needlessly obsessing over details that will have no meaning to any adcom that reads your essay.

i had a feeling you had very good stats...good for you...but you shouldn't go around discouraging people from putting their maximum effort into their secondary applications. i still strongly disagree with your insistence on imposing some sort of artificial time limit that is acceptable for completing secondaries...you should work on them for as long as you need to in order to be happy with the final result. Your assumption on how important or unimportant secondaries may be are just baseless guesses....and your experience in the application cycle does not reflect the typical experience that someone would have (because of your extremely high MCAT).

 

[dw2158]

The average rate for computer transcription is 33 words per minute.[1]

From experience, the average secondary application essay is about 500 words. The average secondary application also has about 2 essays, giving us a total of 1000 words per secondary application.

Given that we grew up in the computer age, and that people religiously using SDN probably type faster than average, I'll make the conservative estimation that SDNers type at a rate of 50 words per minute.

Since the secondary applications require very little thought, though thought nonetheless, I'll knock the average transcription rate down to 30 wpm. That is a full 20 words per minute devoted to thinking, bull****ting, dazzling, thesaurusing, lying, embellishing, &c. If you type any slower than the said 30 wpm because of the thought aspect, you are just plain stupid. Caribbean, maybe?

So, 1000 words divided by 30 words per minute gives us 33.333 minutes devoted to each secondary application.

If a student applies to 20 schools, receives 15 secondary application requests, and doesn't regurgitate or recycle any of his/her essays, it should take the student a mere 500 minutes to complete the secondary applications, or 8.333 hours. Since most students spread the secondary applications over a month (or more), the student will spend approximately 17 minutes per day for one month completing all 15 applications.

Note: most students do not complete 15 secondaries, and most students do recycle essays. Since about one in every two secondary essay is roughly the same prompt, the student is essentially spending half the time writing the essays, or a grand total of 8.5 minutes per day. It takes me more than 8.5 minutes to take a crap.


In conclusion, secondary applications should not be given anything more than a quick thought!



1. Karat, C.M., Halverson, C., Horn, D. and Karat, J. (1999), Patterns of entry and correction in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems, CHI 99 Conference Proceedings, 568–575.

 

[DrWookie]

The average rate for computer transcription is 33 words per minute.[1]

From experience, the average secondary application essay is about 500 words. The average secondary application also has about 2 essays, giving us a total of 1000 words per secondary application.

Given that we grew up in the computer age, and that people religiously using SDN probably type faster than average, I'll make the conservative estimation that SDNers type at a rate of 50 words per minute.

Since the secondary applications require very little thought, though thought nonetheless, I'll knock the average transcription rate down to 30 wpm. That is a full 20 words per minute devoted to thinking, bull****ting, dazzling, thesaurusing, lying, embellishing, &c. If you type any slower than the said 30 wpm because of the thought aspect, you are just plain stupid. Caribbean, maybe?

So, 1000 words divided by 30 words per minute gives us 33.333 minutes devoted to each secondary application.

If a student applies to 20 schools, receives 15 secondary application requests, and doesn't regurgitate or recycle any of his/her essays, it should take the student a mere 500 minutes to complete the secondary applications, or 8.333 hours. Since most students spread the secondary applications over a month (or more), the student will spend approximately 17 minutes per day for one month completing all 15 applications.

Note: most students do not complete 15 secondaries, and most students do recycle essays. Since about one in every two secondary essay is roughly the same prompt, the student is essentially spending half the time writing the essays, or a grand total of 8.5 minutes per day. It takes me more than 8.5 minutes to take a crap.


In conclusion, secondary applications should not be given anything more than a quick thought!



1. Karat, C.M., Halverson, C., Horn, D. and Karat, J. (1999), Patterns of entry and correction in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems, CHI 99 Conference Proceedings, 568–575.

^^^Nerd^^^

But then again...I was about to do the same thing 😀

 

[WashMe]

The average rate for computer transcription is 33 words per minute.[1]

From experience, the average secondary application essay is about 500 words. The average secondary application also has about 2 essays, giving us a total of 1000 words per secondary application.

Given that we grew up in the computer age, and that people religiously using SDN probably type faster than average, I'll make the conservative estimation that SDNers type at a rate of 50 words per minute.

Since the secondary applications require very little thought, though thought nonetheless, I'll knock the average transcription rate down to 30 wpm. That is a full 20 words per minute devoted to thinking, bull****ting, dazzling, thesaurusing, lying, embellishing, &c. If you type any slower than the said 30 wpm because of the thought aspect, you are just plain stupid. Caribbean, maybe?

So, 1000 words divided by 30 words per minute gives us 33.333 minutes devoted to each secondary application.

If a student applies to 20 schools, receives 15 secondary application requests, and doesn't regurgitate or recycle any of his/her essays, it should take the student a mere 500 minutes to complete the secondary applications, or 8.333 hours. Since most students spread the secondary applications over a month (or more), the student will spend approximately 17 minutes per day for one month completing all 15 applications.

Note: most students do not complete 15 secondaries, and most students do recycle essays. Since about one in every two secondary essay is roughly the same prompt, the student is essentially spending half the time writing the essays, or a grand total of 8.5 minutes per day. It takes me more than 8.5 minutes to take a crap.


In conclusion, secondary applications should not be given anything more than a quick thought!



1. Karat, C.M., Halverson, C., Horn, D. and Karat, J. (1999), Patterns of entry and correction in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems, CHI 99 Conference Proceedings, 568–575.

The problem with all of this nice math is that it grossly underestimates the time spent thinking by the average applicant, myself included. Completing my secondaries was no small task. I did, after all, get an "N" on the writing section. I slaved over my secondary essays.

 

[ButImLETired]

I'd like to just mention a couple of things about the Duke beast:

1) at least one essay was new this year, different from the ones last year. So if you have extra time, go ahead and draft all the 2008 ones and hopefully you won't need to write more than one new one. Otherwise, I suggest you wait.

2) The essays were long and there were many, but I appreciated feeling like maybe a med school cared about more than my gpa and MCAT score. It says a lot about Duke, in my opinion, that it's one of the few top-10 schools that really requires a lot of reflection out of its applicants. Kudos to them for that.

3) They actually care about those essays, at least enough to give lower-than-average-stats people a shot. Before everyone yells "well duh you're URM zomggggg", there are actually a number of people on MDApps who aren't URM and who don't have perfect numbers who have gotten interviews at Duke, and they all seem to either have interesting stories or a background in writing. My interviewers had basically memorized my essays, too, which is more than I can say for interviewers at other schools who barely knew who I was.

 

[RecyclingBinh]

thank you everyone for the input. I will try to put in the least amount of time to get a quality essay.

I am done with my personal statement and it took me forever to get it edited by many people. I'm afraid that I won't have enough time to get my secondaries edited because I have horrible grammar problems, i.e. subject berb agreement. As an immigrant it is hard to write a good essay without grammar errors in it.

I applied to many summer programs and most of them have the same essay prompt. So I generated one essay and fix a bit here and there to send to them. I will look through most school's secondary prompts on SDN and try to find that center theme. If I do this, then I can fix snip bits and try to match it to certain secondaries.

 

[Excelsius]

thank you everyone for the input. I will try to put in the least amount of time to get a quality essay.

...I'm afraid that I won't have enough time to get my secondaries edited because I have horrible grammar problems, i.e. subject berb agreement. As an immigrant it is hard to write a good essay without grammar errors in it.
...

Well, I think you missed the point. Especially with your knowledge of grammar, you should spend as much time on your essays as possible.

 

[funkymunkytoes]

The problem with all of this nice math is that it grossly underestimates the time spent thinking by the average applicant, myself included.

Caribbean?