MSPE comments vs. Dean's letter narrative

[mercaptovizadeh]

How much do PDs care about the MSPE individual course evaluations vs. the Dean's letter narrative? The narrative is fine but just addresses the core clerkships. However, there have been two electives I had taken that had some pretty superlative comments, which I'd like to be noted by PDs going over the MSPE.

Do PDs read the individual course comments or just the Dean's 3-paragraph summary?

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[Doctor Bob]

How much do PDs care about the MSPE individual course evaluations vs. the Dean's letter narrative? The narrative is fine but just addresses the core clerkships. However, there have been two electives I had taken that had some pretty superlative comments, which I'd like to be noted by PDs going over the MSPE.

Do PDs read the individual course comments or just the Dean's 3-paragraph summary?

Well everyone has their own way of reviewing an application. Some people read every line, others just look at the summaries. Others just skim the whole thing.

The average application is... umm... maybe 20 pages, double sided. And we get lots of them. It's just not feasible to read every line of every application. There's a lot of skimming involved. The in-depth review comes after you've been granted an interview and we're getting ready to talk to you face to face (because now we've trimmed down the number of applications by weeding out people based on GPA/ClassRank/BoardScores and other criteria)

One or two comments is not going to make or break your application and lead to you getting or not getting an interview. We're most likely to notice those comments around interview time, but at that point we've already formed our own opinion of you.