Secondary Seige

[Dominator39]

I was wondering how much time and effort you guys are putting into your secondary essays. Many of the secondaries I received are due back in 2 weeks, so I won't be able to give all of them as much thought as I would like. Do you think we have to make these sound as elegant as our personal statements? It is the only thing the schools have to go on besides numbers when deciding whether to interview. Let me know how you are getting by.

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[SMW]

Crankin' 'em out as fast as possible. I'm going for straightforward rather than elegant answers. It's not the only thing -- they have our personal statement, our vision statement, our post-sec experiences, and our LOR's. My God, how much information do they need?

 

[sandflea]

after a while, you get to the point where you can start reusing essays, or at least cutting and pasting some together, so i put some real time and effort into the first few secondaries, and the process has been moving faster and faster as i build up a little library of essays i've written about every aspect of medicine and why i want to go into it.

it gets better.

 

[Scooby Doo]

I spent a HUGE amount of time on my personal statement..about a day on my vision statement...
and now I am spending on average about 2 hours per 600 word (or 2,000 character) essay. There is no point to spend as much time on these anymore. They have our scores and our other essays.
My guess is that about 75% of people are admitted by numbers alone (and good interviews)..then the other 25% is made up of the essays. I think the majority of the essays that count are the ones on the AMCAS. These secondary ones are just to get to know a little bit more about you
Pretty boring I think...

 

[Sir William Osler]

i'm with scooby on this one. just trying to get through them asap. making sure i bring up all the stuff i want to talk about in the interviews. looking at duke just makes me depressed. definitely a beast.