Submitting primary later to help with secondaries' timing

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captivewill

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Hi! I was originally planning on submitting my primary on 6/10 so that I'd be verified around 7/10. However, I'm going to be pretty busy with a new job during the month of July, and I'd rather not have to worry about secondaries during that time. Ideally, I would get my secondaries in August when I'm more free so that I can better manage the two-week turnaround time, and I'd also have more time to pre-write. With this in mind, would it make sense for me to delay submitting my primary until ~6/25 so that I can hopefully get verified and receive my secondaries later? Sorry for such a neurotic post :( My main concern is that this slight delay would negatively impact my application, but applying early shouldn't be that important since I'm not applying anywhere MD-only, and even the rolling admissions MD/PhD programs seem to have their cycle slightly later anyways. I feel like my primary is pretty ready to submit in the next few days, but if it would help my secondaries' timing, I think submitting later might be the move for me. I'd really appreciate any insight, thanks!

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You can search for secondaries from previous years on here and pre-write answers to them. Usually they don't change significantly from one year to the next.
 
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No reason to do this IMO. Even if you can only work on 1 secondary for a half hour each night in July, you will still be ahead of where you would be without getting started. Stress will only increase as time goes by.
 
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This seems like a silly decision, OP. The later you submit the worse your odds of getting an interview are. Do you think that your one-year job should outweigh the following eight years of life?

I would just start pre-writing now to ease your workload in July, but still submit as soon as humanly possible.
 
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This makes no sense. If you're concerned about not having time to write in July, the solution is not to write them later. It's to write them earlier.

Prewrite your secondaries, and even if you need to work on them a bit in July, you should seriously consider which is more important to you.
 
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Got it, I do feel kinda silly now lol. My concern was that not making a two-week turnaround might look bad, but since that isn't a huge deal and is outweighed by the benefits of being earlier, I'll definitely just submit as early as possible. Thank you guys so much!
 
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