How long do secondaries take?

[honeybee87]

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Writing my primary essay with W/A took me 3 months, so how long do secondary essays NORMALLY take? I know each school has a different amount of essays with different character count, but how long do most people take for each schools secondary?

 

[Goro]

Writing my primary essay with W/A took me 3 months, so how long do secondary essays NORMALLY take? I know each school has a different amount of essays with different character count, but how long do most people take for each schools secondary?

Only you can answer this.

 

[deleted889094]

Yeah that's really hard to answer. Depends how you are at writing and which schools you apply to

 

[Moko]

Writing my primary essay with W/A took me 3 months, so how long do secondary essays NORMALLY take? I know each school has a different amount of essays with different character count, but how long do most people take for each schools secondary?

Secondaries should be treated with the same respect as the primary application. They usually take less time as the questions are more direct and less open ended (unlike in the personal statement). Though the questions may differ between secondaries, they largely ask the same things, so secondaries get progressively easier to write.

 

[deleted972488]

I have already prewritten all my secondaries. It took me a few hours per school, but I write pretty quickly. It gets easier as you go along because you can reuse some things you’ve already written (many schools ask the same or similar questions, but you’ll need to adjust for character/word limitations) My primary PS took me maybe 10 hours to write and polish, for reference.

If you’re asking how quickly you should turn them in after receiving them, within two weeks is the general rule of thumb.

 

[deleted889094]

To add, applicants woefully underestimate the time it takes to write and polish secondaries. Applying to medical school is a full time job from May thru August, more likely September.

Agreed. I started pre-writing in April and didn't finish until July. By that point, I hadn't even done my final edit so I was just finalizing the essays as I received the secondaries. It takes a lot of time.

It's good to put some time between when you write the essays and when you edit them. Far more likely to find mistakes and think of better phrasings. Nobody writes a perfect essay in one sitting

 

[Dr. Anonymouss]

I have been writing mine for about 2 months now. I have about 16 schools finished and just a couple to go. I work full time so when I am not at work I try to write an essay prompt or two. A lot of the schools have 4-5 essay prompts and they can vary in length. The hardest aspect of writing these was to think about what I wanted to say. My advice, start early and don't wait until you receive them. Best of luck.

 

[EasyEveryoneWouldDoIt]

they start getting easier the more you write them and go through them since a lot of them use the same prompts though word/character limits vary from school to school. i started out with a goal of 1-3 essays a day depending if it was a week day or weekend so i didn't get burnt out from writing essays. i also recommend grammarly. i ran all my essays through it a few times. duke and u of miami are known for having long secondaries, while i believe there are a few that didn't even have any prompts

 

[2019App]

That sounds like a good strategy. Can you clarify how grammerly works? Does it act like a real-time app/extension of MS Word providing feedack as you write, or do you use it to review your essays after you’ve drafted them?

 

[EasyEveryoneWouldDoIt]

its a subscription service and you can either use the website to cut and paste or download the program and you can upload your word document. there is a free version of it, but its no where as good as the paid version. i plan on keeping my subscription for med school

 

[chlorocruorin]

I pre-wrote ~40 pages worth of secondaries in a month. Id do like 3-5 schools a day (I had the entire day to do it). It’s a lot but worth it. My turnaround time was a no more than a day when I actually got the secondary.