For those who have applied more than once..

1-YES!!! Don't recycle the primary essay! Use the opportunity to tell repeat schools more about yourself.

2-It's good to keep your secondary essays. If you are applying to a new school, you can pull from old secondaries. DON'T send the same essay to a single school. The key is to give them as much info as you can.

3-I think I already answered this.

Good Luck! Stay optimistic til the bitter end.

 

1- I wrote a completely different personal essay. I reapplied to a couple of schools and knew for a fact that one of them keeps old apps and refers to them sometimes so I wanted to show them that there is more to me than what they rejected the first time.

2- I kept all of my old secondaries to refer to for material this time around. However, I did not send the same secondary essays to schools I was reapplying to.

3- If I was reapplying to a school, I wrote a completely new essay. If it was a school that I hadn't previously applied to, I used/tweaked essays from the previous application process if they were revelvant.

Good luck!

 

I have a list called [email protected]

it is a list for people who are applying again.

So far, there are only 4 people on the list. But it would be fun if we can have more people.

if you want to subscribe, just send an email to

[email protected]

then just follow the direction

 

i applied again.
i changed everything. new PS (similar topics though).
OFCOURSE i didn't write the same garbage for the secondaries. if you have to apply again, you may find out in a year that you've matured quite a bit. i think that alone will make your writing (PS, secondaries, even the mcat essays) stronger because your ideas and ways of expressing them have evolved. actually i even got some extra letters of rec to add to my committee letter. so i pretty much did some tweaking to the entire application. ofcourse i tweaked my gpa for the worse, as well. we'll see how it turns out. good luck to you

 

As a reapplicant this year,
(1) Yes
(2) Yes
(3) Sort of....

In my mind, these are impt, but not critical. The more critical components are: MCAT, GPA and EC's. Also, if your GPA is not that great, a good MCAT score can offset a low GPA in my opinion.

 

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