Question about Secondaries for Reapplicant

[anonymousdeinonychus]

Hey guys, I am a reapplicant (first cycle 1 II -> Waitlist). Many of the school adcoms I talked to said they couldn't figure out what was wrong with my app, as I have decent scores, good clinical experience/research and my essays were fine (according to them) but note that I did take 0 gap years the first time around. I think the main issue was that my PS wasn't conveying the reason for me being a doctor, which one of the adcoms agreed with (also my school list). I got some really impactful clinical work experience last summer which I had started shortly before submitting my primary, so I did not get to talk about it in my PS but I wrote many secondary essays using stories from this experience. Because of this, I got really good feedback about my secondaries and I personally think they were way better than my PS. I recently graduated so I am working at this clinic again this year.

I have significantly changed my PS this time around to reflect my reason better, so my question is should I change my secondaries if they were good the first time around? I know some schools use both old and new applications to review applicants, so is submitting the same secondaries a red flag for them?

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[futuresurg613]

Same situation here-- following this!

 

[gyngyn]

One should certainly add any new updates to W&A.
There is almost always a better way to express oneself (new insights, fresh ideas...).
If everything is exactly the same, some screeners will interpret this as laziness, hubris or stubbornness.

 

[porpoise]

I certainly added new activities / employment to my application. The biggest difference is that I got more clinical and volunteer experience.
My personal statement now includes those experiences though I didn't do a full re-write.

I hope readers are focusing on whether my descriptions are meaningful and well-written, not doing a line-by-line comparison to my first app.

 

[Blue185]

Similarly to porpoise, I have also updated my activities section as well as editing my personal statement to include my past year. I'm currently working on editing essays for schools so that my application isn't exactly the same for them.

However, I do have questions about schools that I did get an interview invite from the previous cycle. One school in particular gave individualized feedbacks after the cycle, and when I talked to them they explicitly mentioned liking my writing, and what held me back the most last cycle (at least for their school) was a lack of DO experience as well as a late application date. In which case, would you still recommend for me to change up my secondaries? Or just send in my secondaries as is for that school?

One should certainly add any new updates to W&A.
There is almost always a better way to express oneself (new insights, fresh ideas...).
If everything is exactly the same, some screeners will interpret this as laziness, hubris or stubbornness.

 

[gyngyn]

In which case, would you still recommend for me to change up my secondaries? Or just send in my secondaries as is for that school?

If they told you to use the same answers, you should use the same essays for that school's secondary!

 

[Mr.Smile12]

... One school in particular gave individualized feedbacks after the cycle, and when I talked to them they explicitly mentioned liking my writing, and what held me back the most last cycle (at least for their school) was a lack of DO experience as well as a late application date. In which case, would you still recommend for me to change up my secondaries? Or just send in my secondaries as is for that school?

It depends if the prompts ask you why you're interested in osteopathic medicine. If no prompts ask you this explicitly, are there any prompts that you can swing a sentence or two in that highlights what you have done to understand osteopathic philosophy better?

 

[anonymousdeinonychus]

One should certainly add any new updates to W&A.
There is almost always a better way to express oneself (new insights, fresh ideas...).
If everything is exactly the same, some screeners will interpret this as laziness, hubris or stubbornness.

Thank you! I am changing and adding new updates to my W&A section, so my primary app is pretty different. I was mainly wondering more about how much I should change my secondary essays, since I got good feedback on those?

 

[gyngyn]

I was mainly wondering more about how much I should change my secondary essays, since I got good feedback on those?

Just enough so that we can tell that you didn't just re-send the same ones!

 

[ClashRoyaleKing]

I feel you. 1 II at Belmont -> 1 WL and seems like it will be an R soon. I felt like I had decent activities, test scores, and essays. In retrospect, I may have looked too much like a box checker (recently started non-clinical work and research), essays did not include enough reflection, and my test scores were just kind of middle/back of the pack (69LM, low preview, mid/low quartile casper). Although I didn’t have any new activities to add to my application, I re-wrote almost every single one of them with more a focus on descriptions of my activities and impact vs telling stories.

We can try to guess what went wrong, but truly, nobody knows. Re-write what feels weak and write new essays were you have different responses to questions.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

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[LindaAccepted]

Hey guys, I am a reapplicant (first cycle 1 II -> Waitlist). Many of the school adcoms I talked to said they couldn't figure out what was wrong with my app, as I have decent scores, good clinical experience/research and my essays were fine (according to them) but note that I did take 0 gap years the first time around. I think the main issue was that my PS wasn't conveying the reason for me being a doctor, which one of the adcoms agreed with (also my school list). I got some really impactful clinical work experience last summer which I had started shortly before submitting my primary, so I did not get to talk about it in my PS but I wrote many secondary essays using stories from this experience. Because of this, I got really good feedback about my secondaries and I personally think they were way better than my PS. I recently graduated so I am working at this clinic again this year.

I have significantly changed my PS this time around to reflect my reason better, so my question is should I change my secondaries if they were good the first time around? I know some schools use both old and new applications to review applicants, so is submitting the same secondaries a red flag for them?

My concern is that if you changed your PS to talk more about your recent clinical experience and your secondary essays spoke about your clinical experience last year and you essentially use those secondaries again, won't there be a lot of repetition and overlap between the primary and the secondaries for schools where you are reapplying? You want to minimize that. You want them to complement each other. Having your primary answer why medicine and highlight the new experience is great. But make sure that your secondaries don't duplicate the primary.