1-Did you rewrite your personal essay?
Completely and totally. There were way too many changes in my life between last year and this year and I wanted my personal statement to reflect that somewhat.
2-Did you rewrite all of your secondary essays?
or
3-Did you basically keep your essays and just tweak them a bit (personal and secondary)?
I mostly rewrote my secondary essays. I only reapplied to two of the same schools. One of those schools did not require essays and the other (Pritzker) had similar questions, but as I said, my life changed, so... My secondary essays changed too, to reflect my new take on a lot of things in life. However, I did recycle them between schools if the questions were similar enough. It gets tedious writing the same thing over and over from scratch, as you know
The essays and stuff were definitely not the only thing about my app that changed. I have more volunteer experiences, leadership experience, and research experience, and my GPA is higher. I didn't retake the MCAT because I could not imagine being in that dungeon again for 9 hours. I only used 3 of the same LORs from last year to this year-- the rest are different. I also applied to DO schools this year, which I did not last year.
Good luck. And keep your optimism up. I should probably follow my own advice on that