So I submitted like early july ( around 8th) am still waiting to be verified....I was supposed to be diligent and work on secondaries but I was being ******ed and decided not to do anything till about yesterday. I've applied to 30 ish schools and I was planning on trying to finish all my secondaries by the end of august. Is that a reasonable plan without sacrificing quality? How fast have people been able to complete secondaries without making them crappy?
Is a month a reasonable time to spend on about 30 secondaries
- Thread starter snowys435
- Start date
A lot of secondaries over lap and you get asked certain questions repeatedly. Diversity essays and greatest challenge essays were asked at many of the schools I applied to. Some schools don't have essays but rather they have short answer questions. I would say for 50-60% of the essay questions I was able to cut and paste a previous essay (and then edited it to meet the word limit). Even "why x-med school essays" started following a certain format. Only a few schools have really unique essay prompts that require a bunch of brand new essays.
A month is enough time. I would go ahead and look at the various secondary prompts. See which questions are asked by many schools. For example, if 10 different schools ask about diversity then you can spend a little extra time on this essay and rework it for each schools.
- Joined
- Oct 29, 2011
- Messages
- 3,578
- Reaction score
- 548
You can probably finish them in two weeks and still have them be quality because many of them will overlap and you can just change the school name.
The school specific ones will be a little different, but you will still have a few reasons that overlap that you can copy/paste.
Just start working on them.
- Joined
- May 26, 2012
- Messages
- 1,605
- Reaction score
- 127
My secondaries are taking forever. Part of the problem is I'm a perfectionist, but the main issue is that most MD/PhD applications want is essentially a PhD personal statement that can't really be reused between schools. I meant to be done with everything this week, but instead I've only got 4/23 submitted and another 4-5 ready for a final check before submission.
