Question about Secondaires?

[ChyLn]

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So I've been looking at some of the secondaries, namely Stanford and Columbia so far.

The essay prompts for those are very very similar to the ones for the AMCAS essays (I'm applying MD/PhD)

Are you guys re-using parts of those essays are re-writing them entirely? For me at least, there would be tons and tons of unavoidable overlap.

thanks!

 

[Reimat]

So I've been looking at some of the secondaries, namely Stanford and Columbia so far.

The essay prompts for those are very very similar to the ones for the AMCAS essays (I'm applying MD/PhD)

Are you guys re-using parts of those essays are re-writing them entirely? For me at least, there would be tons and tons of unavoidable overlap.

thanks!

For my top schools, I'm not using any old material. I rewrote a number of essays with a slightly or completely different theme from the AMCAS essays. There was one essay where I just used my AMCAS- Johns Hopkins requires a 4500 character research summary, and after emailing the admissions office I just cut my 10000 character AMCAS summary down to 4500 characters. However, with essays like the Stanford diversity essay, if you already talked about a difficult background in your personal statement, I'm sure you're ok talking about it in more detail.

Btw, Stanford is by far the worst secondary I've seen so far. 10 mini essays? I think they're trying to decrease the applicant pool by making their secondary a lot of trouble to fill out.

 

[ChyLn]

Yeah... The Stanford Secondary is horrendous... I ended up just cutting my other statements into smaller pieces and tailoring them to fit the prompts... but they're basically the same as the bigger essays.... do you think this is ok?

 

[ChocoCowie]

Btw, Stanford is by far the worst secondary I've seen so far. 10 mini essays? I think they're trying to decrease the applicant pool by making their secondary a lot of trouble to fill out.

gosh i absolutely agree, I looked through the application and almost choked!

but i dunno if copy and paste is a good idea for schools, after all they already read the AMCAS one, repetivitive statements may show lack of interest in the school.

What I am probably gonna do is write another essay for a prompt and copy and cut from that for the individual applications

 

[Thundrstorm]

For the most part, I've been writing new essays. For Columbia, I did. I expounded further on the same points I made in my MD/PhD essay (and even refered them to it. e.g." As I mentioned in my AMCAS essays, I am interested in researching infectious disease"). I have been cutting and pasting to some extent b/c I just said it all so perfectly in my AMCAS essay. However, I don't want to seem uninterested, so I have been adding new information. Actually, it's funny b/c I was grumbling about the Columbia essay prompt, but after I wrote it, I realized that I had articulated a really clear vision of my goals as an physician scientist, and it actually crystallized things for me. It helped me to answer essays in other secondaries.