Ranking importance

[gocanes1990]

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Considering the importance of parts of your application such as gpa and mcat which are probably the most important, where does the value of secondaries fall? Are they one of the least important part of an app, Lower than PS, EC, and others?

 

[LiveLoveLearn]

I think that it is really difficult to rank these things, and it generally varies by school, and everything sort of combines to make the "whole package". I would say that if you have stellar GPA and MCAT (>3.9, 37), or some really amazing/unique ECs, then they may be enough to make the secondaries not very important.

Otherwise, schools generally use secondaries to sort through all of the applicants that have similar applications. They will have a stack of people with a 3.8/35/standard ECs, and even though those are really good stats, they aren't going to interview all of them. They choose which ones based on PS and secondary answers.

TL/DR: Don't give in to temptation to blow off your secondaries. Although they seem ridiculous, comparatively unimportant, and like a major time suck, they can make the difference between getting and not getting an interview.

 

[gocanes1990]

Its just weird, when some schools that receive 10K apps, such asDrexel and NYMC do not have secondary essays, how do they sort and organize who gets interviews?

 

[LiveLoveLearn]

Its just weird, when some schools that receive 10K apps, such asDrexel and NYMC do not have secondary essays, how do they sort and organize who gets interviews?

I think a lot of them purposely don't have secondaries because of the huge amount of applicants that they get, so they don't want to read them all. Any way, I think that they are more reliant on the PS to set applicants apart,and then commonly interview a much larger number of applicants than other schools (~10x the number accepted vs 2-3x), so they get a lot of the information that they would have seen in secondaries in the interview.