Do seats really fill up that quickly?

[BrianK0220]

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[notbobtrustme]

I took the MCAT August 12, scored a 37T and got only 2 interview invites in March/April.

While that one particular school may have adcom meetings in December, don't pin your hopes on a single school.

 

[theseeker4]

Why is there so much pressure for taking the MCAT as soon as possible and then applying on the first day possible? The UAMS admissions committee doesn't meet until December, and then they meet once more in February before sending out acceptances.

I feel like everyone is rushing the MCAT and slashing their potential study time in half. I'm taking the MCAT August 17. Most would say this is a bad idea, but I haven't had the pre-reqs in years and need time to prepare.

Most schools start accepting people in October, and fill up most of their seats quickly. Each applicant who is considered early in the cycle is being compared to all the other applicants who were also early, while being considered late in the cycle means you are being compared to every other applicant regardless of how early or late they applied (so a much larger number), often for a smaller number of seats than the first group. This makes the odds of being accepted much greater early on than later in the cycle.

Depending on the school, and your stats, August may be a little late, or very late. I believe some schools even have cutoff dates for applying in September (may be wrong about this). You want to talk to the schools you plan to apply to about whether a September 17th or so date for your primary application to be received by them is too late for proper consideration.

 

[LizzyM]

Unlike college, medical school admission requires an interview. Interview invitations start going out in July from some schools, August from others. Check school specific threads for information about last cycle at the schools you are targeting. The adcom may not make decision until December but they started collecting data months earlier through in-person interviews. You can't get an interview slot without the primary & secondary application.

 

[MedBound1]

Bottom line is that applying early is as important as people say it is.. Rolling admissions + the shear amount of information that schools gather on each applicant before they decide makes applying early huge. With over 40,000 applicants every year, many of them, lets say half, are taking the advice to apply as early as possible.. that means schools nationwide are looking at over 20,000 people and making decisions on them way before your app even hits their door.

As far as when to take the MCAT, my advisers said to take it the summer before my junior year in college, so that if I needed to retake I could take it in the spring of my junior year and still have my app in on the day AMCAS opens. As LizzyM said, many many schools will start inviting interviews to people who have completed primaries and secondaries in July!! That means people will be interviewing 2 months before your MCAT score even comes back. I know several people who applied the year I did that had an acceptance by the first week of September, before you would even have a complete application (and that's one less seat that you get to fight for).

 

[TheMightySmiter]

Yes, seats do really fill up that quickly. Some schools have their entire class filled by December. I think June is the latest I'd recommend taking the MCAT.

 

[robertch8]

Well most schools are rolling and as others have said, some already finish interviews by December and January even though the "deadline" is December, but in reality you should be completing your apps much earlier. But the whole "let's get my AMCAS primary submitted on June 1st", that's because SDN people are super neurotic. As long as you get your primary in sometime June-early July and you complete your secondaries by the end of August, you will be fine.

 

[mvenus929]

As far as when to take the MCAT, my advisers said to take it the summer before my junior year in college, so that if I needed to retake I could take it in the spring of my junior year and still have my app in on the day AMCAS opens. As LizzyM said, many many schools will start inviting interviews to people who have completed primaries and secondaries in July!! That means people will be interviewing 2 months before your MCAT score even comes back. I know several people who applied the year I did that had an acceptance by the first week of September, before you would even have a complete application (and that's one less seat that you get to fight for).

Few things bad about this advice.
1) If you take the MCAT the fall before your junior year, you have to be accepted by the year after you graduate, or you will have to retake the MCAT. This may not seem like a big deal to most people (because most people think that they'll get in), but I took two full years off between graduation and med school... the first year I worked on improving my application, and the second I actually applied. If you don't apply until your senior year and don't get in, you don't have that wiggle room of an extra year to really improve your application if you don't work to improve it while you're still in school.

2) As far as I know, only Texas schools interview in July. The rest start interviews at the end of August or early September. Some start as late as October. You get your MCAT score about 30 days after you take the test, so most people won't have interviewed before you get your score.

However, most people will be complete (I think at one point, LizzyM stated that her school got 40% of their applications for the year in the month of July). And a good portion will have gotten interview invites, perhaps before you've even gotten a secondary.

3) Unless you're applying EDP, AAMC schools cannot offer you an acceptance until October 15th. So the idea of people having acceptances in early September is a little suspect. EDP is competitive on its own, as the schools that do this only accept a few students each year via this program, if any at all.

So the reason you apply early isn't so you can get an early acceptance; it's so that you can get the best chance at an interview invite. After all, most schools have a 40-50% acceptance rate from their interview pool. If you get an interview early on, you're much more likely to get an acceptance (one of my friends on our admissions committee said that they tend to offer to 80% of applicants in the beginning, and only 20% towards the end).

Also, the idea that one acceptance = one seat in the class is false. Most schools have to overaccept students in order to fill their class. Another reason why people begging for those with multiple acceptances to drop them so there can be waitlist movement early is silly, because there may be 200 acceptances (or more) pending for a class size of 150 (or less). If 5 of those people drop their acceptance early, there aren't going to be any more acceptances, because there will still be 45 too many for the class.

 

[BrianK0220]

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