Strategy/Planning for Efficiently Writing Secondaries

[livefreely]

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Hi All:

Secondaries seem daunting.. Wondering if folks would like to share ideas for efficiently turning them around? A discussion of the following may be helpful for many, including myself:

-Time-management
-order in which they should be attacked
-strategy for writing essays that can be re-used

Cheers.

 

[SexyDoctor]

I know that most essays for the schools don't change year to year, so you can definitely go ahead and start early with the secondaries if you look in the specific school pre-allo thread.

 

[MediCynical]

Well the most obvious thing is to re-use essays/chunks of essays.

That said, do NOT put off essays. There were some applications that I just filled out the biographical info and waited for the essays until later... bad choice. Just DO THEM, no second thoughts.

Also, be sure to look at your secondaries as soon as you get them. I dun goofed on a few of them and didn't check the "due by" date.

 

[saxophone4]

I'm having a really hard time with this too.. I've received 12 secondaries in the past week and feel like I'm drowning in a Pacific ocean of medical questions and essays. One thing that's helped me is to input all the questions from all the schools into a spread sheet, and then sort them into categories by what they're asking (Diversity question? Why do you want to go to<insert university name>?) It's helped me wrap my head around the work, and decreased the amount of full essays I have to write since I know how many I can re-use now. Good luck!

 

[pkwraith]

Since some schools track turnaround time from secondary to complete, I sorted the applications by the order that I received them, and then just took them in chronological order.

I crunched them down to around one school per day (obviously, excluding very simple applications such as just-pay ones). You just need to find a schedule with the right balance. You want to be able to be work every single day, which allows you creative and communication skills to stay warmed up and peaking. But, you also don't want to work too much that you burn out, which is easy to do with writing-based tasks.

It gets a lot easier the more secondaries you go through, as you build up a repertoire of essays that you can recycle and reuse. Many times, the content and the core idea is the important part. You want to keep your idea simple enough where you can cut words/characters of essays to fit word/character limits and still maintain its original intent. But with enough depths that you can still jamming in additional details for longer essays.

 

[Donnie1310]

Day 1: Bang out a rough draft of all the essays in an application, save. It doesn't matter how bad it is, as long as you have an idea of what you're going to write about.

Day 2: Revise. Submit.

For me, editing is a breeze, it's the initial draft that is daunting. So I just make myself write something.

I actually find reusing essays to be very difficult due to word/character limit differences. I'll reuse an idea maybe, but just rewrite the essay quickly so it fits the new limit.

 

[WhizoMD]

ignore character limits (if you're below), just write until you get the point across, nothing more. Anything more just lengthens your noose, and likely annoys the adcom member who has to read 1000+ essays.

Note: you should obviously take this with a grain of salt since I'm still applying