Pre-Writing Secondaries

[MedPR]

Any non-trads who work and go to school have a plan for getting secondaries pre-written? I really don't have a ton of free time, but I know it's necessary to get these in ASAP.

 

[Slev]

It's time consuming so start early, don't procrastinate, and just keep at. I tried to do one per evening. Once you get through the first few it gets a lot faster as there is a lot of overlap between schools.

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[pkwraith]

It's just a matter of planning. I made a spreadsheet of all my schools, their secondary receipt date (although that probably won't help with pre-writing), essay prompts, word/character count. If you go through the School-specific threads, they all have the essay prompts.

Then, you can organize them by topic or subject matter. Most secondaries follow about 10 variations of questions(biggest challenge, ethical dilemma, why school, altruism, etc). Once you cover most of the archetypes, it's about mix and matching, cutting/adding words for character/word limit. Save each essay and name them appropriately.

Being super organized with the planning saves a lot of time in the long haul. It's definitely quite possible to churn out an essay/day (or two short essays) on a busy schedule, and it gets easier/faster as you go along.

Once you receive the secondaries requests, you should resort them based on receipt day to minimize turnover time for each school.

 

[MedPR]

It's time consuming so start early, don't procrastinate, and just keep at. I tried to do one per evening. Once you get through the first few it gets a lot faster as there is a lot of overlap between schools.

Sent from my HTC Glacier using Tapatalk 2

It's just a matter of planning. I made a spreadsheet of all my schools, their secondary receipt date (although that probably won't help with pre-writing), essay prompts, word/character count. If you go through the School-specific threads, they all have the essay prompts.

Then, you can organize them by topic or subject matter. Most secondaries follow about 10 variations of questions(biggest challenge, ethical dilemma, why school, altruism, etc). Once you cover most of the archetypes, it's about mix and matching, cutting/adding words for character/word limit. Save each essay and name them appropriately.

Being super organized with the planning saves a lot of time in the long haul. It's definitely quite possible to churn out an essay/day (or two short essays) on a busy schedule, and it gets easier/faster as you go along.

Once you receive the secondaries requests, you should resort them based on receipt day to minimize turnover time for each school.

Thanks! I'm applying to 34 schools (MD/DO) and my plan is to write at least one per day starting today. I actually just got done writing SLU's secondary. I figure if I do one per day for the next 34 days, my AMCAS/AACOMAS will either just have gotten verified or still be in the process so I should have them all written by the time secondaries start coming out.

 

[smartell]

It's just a matter of planning. I made a spreadsheet of all my schools, their secondary receipt date (although that probably won't help with pre-writing), essay prompts, word/character count. If you go through the School-specific threads, they all have the essay prompts.

Then, you can organize them by topic or subject matter. Most secondaries follow about 10 variations of questions(biggest challenge, ethical dilemma, why school, altruism, etc). Once you cover most of the archetypes, it's about mix and matching, cutting/adding words for character/word limit. Save each essay and name them appropriately.

Being super organized with the planning saves a lot of time in the long haul. It's definitely quite possible to churn out an essay/day (or two short essays) on a busy schedule, and it gets easier/faster as you go along.

Once you receive the secondaries requests, you should resort them based on receipt day to minimize turnover time for each school.

This sounds amazing!! Do you by any chance have a copy of the spreadsheet you made? I'm absolute garbage with excel so having a good template would be a huge help!