Vent: Dead Application Walking

[Tuppence]

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Hello!

I am new to SDN so please bear with me.

As the post title indicates I just wanted to vent; the past few weeks have been suffocating and I just want to get this off my chest.

I'm a nontraditional applicant and this (2026-2027) is my first cycle. I started a little later than others, but I really underestimated how many secondaries I'd receive (I misunderstood something) and as such prewrote for only ~3 schools by the time I received all of my secondaries at once. As such, writing and submitting my essays have been slow-going.

I still have a handful of schools left and have almost lost all motivation to continue. It really feels like there's no point to continuing - my stats and volunteering are acceptable (maybe even good), but not great; my clinical work hours are pretty good, but do they make up for the rest of my applications deficits? Maybe, maybe not.

Labor day was the goal, but I've accepted that I'll probably not make it by then. On the bright side, I've got all my state schools in and my writing's pretty good, so maybe I have a chance? Odds are stacked, but what can you do? Just gotta keep going, and going, probably into the next cycle (I'm well into the 5 stages of grief of potentially [likely] reapplying). Gotta keep pushing until I get to the end that's right for me, wherever that's at.

If someone sees this, I wish that you don't end up feeling the way I do. Though, honestly, I assume you probably will too. Seems like this is a near universal feeling to experience. We're in it together at least? Like demodex desperately clinging together on the same eyelash.

 

[Toxstxr]

I feel you bro.

Nothing we can do in this life except persist. Persevere.

Most things are not guaranteed, but maybe you can take solace in the fact that you gave it your all. Learn from your mistakes, and if you don't get in, you can try next cycle.

That's how I personally live my life: I give it my best effort, but find fulfillment in the process instead of the outcome, such that if the outcome isn't actualized, I've at least self-actualized by giving it my all.

Maybe that resonates with you, maybe not. Maybe I'm just venting at midnight on a random SDN thread. IDK. I guess I just want to share my life philosophy. Inspired by the plethora of anime I've consumed as an adolescent, of course.

You got this.

 

[Tuppence]

Thanks man, I appreciate you sharing and saying that. I wish you the best too.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

Labor day was the goal, but I've accepted that I'll probably not make it by then. On the bright side, I've got all my state schools in and my writing's pretty good, so maybe I have a chance? Odds are stacked, but what can you do? Just gotta keep going, and going, probably into the next cycle (I'm well into the 5 stages of grief of potentially [likely] reapplying). Gotta keep pushing until I get to the end that's right for me, wherever that's at.

That's all you can do at this point. Just grind through the next 10 miles of the marathon.

 

[Goro]

Hello!

I am new to SDN so please bear with me.

As the post title indicates I just wanted to vent; the past few weeks have been suffocating and I just want to get this off my chest.

I'm a nontraditional applicant and this (2026-2027) is my first cycle. I started a little later than others, but I really underestimated how many secondaries I'd receive (I misunderstood something) and as such prewrote for only ~3 schools by the time I received all of my secondaries at once. As such, writing and submitting my essays have been slow-going.

I still have a handful of schools left and have almost lost all motivation to continue. It really feels like there's no point to continuing - my stats and volunteering are acceptable (maybe even good), but not great; my clinical work hours are pretty good, but do they make up for the rest of my applications deficits? Maybe, maybe not.

Labor day was the goal, but I've accepted that I'll probably not make it by then. On the bright side, I've got all my state schools in and my writing's pretty good, so maybe I have a chance? Odds are stacked, but what can you do? Just gotta keep going, and going, probably into the next cycle (I'm well into the 5 stages of grief of potentially [likely] reapplying). Gotta keep pushing until I get to the end that's right for me, wherever that's at.

If someone sees this, I wish that you don't end up feeling the way I do. Though, honestly, I assume you probably will too. Seems like this is a near universal feeling to experience. We're in it together at least? Like demodex desperately clinging together on the same eyelash.

The DO cycle is longer....until Thanksgiving.

 

[polymerization]

Agreeing with Goro. This period of time between late June - early October is really crucial for admissions, at least it seemed so during my cycle last year. All of my interview invites and subsequent interviews happened in that interval and then it was crickets the rest of the cycle. Obviously plenty of people reported activity thereafter, but none for me personally, and I was expecting a lot of activity after applying to 50+ schools.

If it were me, I would save the secondary fee at several of your reaches and put in applications to DO schools. Better to matriculate at one of the better DO programs than roll the dice again. Plus, it would give you good information if you do find yourself a reapplicant to both pathways.

 

[Tuppence]

That's all you can do at this point. Just grind through the next 10 miles of the marathon.

Thank you for the encouragement 🙂. Doing my best now.

 

[Tuppence]

The DO cycle is longer....until Thanksgiving.

Thank you for the advice! I'm looking into it now.

 

[Tuppence]

Agreeing with Goro. This period of time between late June - early October is really crucial for admissions, at least it seemed so during my cycle last year. All of my interview invites and subsequent interviews happened in that interval and then it was crickets the rest of the cycle. Obviously plenty of people reported activity thereafter, but none for me personally, and I was expecting a lot of activity after applying to 50+ schools.

If it were me, I would save the secondary fee at several of your reaches and put in applications to DO schools. Better to matriculate at one of the better DO programs than roll the dice again. Plus, it would give you good information if you do find yourself a reapplicant to both pathways.

Yes, I think I will start looking into DO's. Fortunately, I'm on FAP so at least I won't have to worry about fees.

 

[polymerization]

Yes, I think I will start looking into DO's. Fortunately, I'm on FAP so at least I won't have to worry about fees.

It's not the financial aspect that I would be worried about, per se. I had FAP too, so I was tempted to apply to many schools. It's something that Goro says regularly and that I took for granted throughout my own cycle: applying to a bunch of schools becomes progressively counterproductive both because you are not equally competitive everywhere and secondaries become a physically impossible burden.

Something I would add to his framework is that you kind of don't know how deep to study schools at first. In my case, I was pulling together admissions staff podcast interviews available on YouTube, school website resources, institutional strategic plans, news articles, even pet projects for some core faculty prior to writing my secondary. Not all of that information was useful, and took a lot of time to collate. I would spend a whole day just trying to get a sense of the school, and then multiple days crafting the perfect secondary that I was convinced could be adapted for the next school. And even that felt rushed at the time, because of the urgency of time passing.

Everything's fine until you study the next school and realize they're different in x, y, z ways and now you need to adapt an adaptation, make different points, etc etc. to the point where it's just a new secondary essay. So you truly accumulate wasted hours over time and start shedding preparation as you go.

The time pressure could force you to cut corners, not because you don't care, but because you have to: from a whole day psychoanalyzing faculty to a passerby glance at the website and praying that there are commonalities across all schools nonspecific enough to work with whatever (hopefully) unoffensive claims you're making in your writing. As time passes and you realize you are going to start being late, you have to pick up the pace, and the more schools you have, the more early and quickly the process degrades.

I have to tell you I was very confident: I would consider myself on the humanistic side and I love to write and argue, but I didn't know what I didn't know at the time. The kind of cognitive bandwidth you need to have to write hundreds of individually tailored essays over the course of, sometimes, just 2 weeks - 1 month was not sustainable for me. I started off strong but I would say well over half of my applications were donations because they were poorly researched and poorly written.

So the goal here is not for you to add DO schools to a big MD list. What I would do in your shoes is consider giving up whatever longshot MD schools you have not yet sent secondaries to and abandon them completely in favor of schools you are still early enough in the cycle to be genuinely considered at.

 

[Tuppence]

It's not the financial aspect that I would be worried about, per se. I had FAP too, so I was tempted to apply to many schools. It's something that Goro says regularly and that I took for granted throughout my own cycle: applying to a bunch of schools becomes progressively counterproductive both because you are not equally competitive everywhere and secondaries become a physically impossible burden.

Something I would add to his framework is that you kind of don't know how deep to study schools at first. In my case, I was pulling together admissions staff podcast interviews available on YouTube, school website resources, institutional strategic plans, news articles, even pet projects for some core faculty prior to writing my secondary. Not all of that information was useful, and took a lot of time to collate. I would spend a whole day just trying to get a sense of the school, and then multiple days crafting the perfect secondary that I was convinced could be adapted for the next school. And even that felt rushed at the time, because of the urgency of time passing.

Everything's fine until you study the next school and realize they're different in x, y, z ways and now you need to adapt an adaptation, make different points, etc etc. to the point where it's just a new secondary essay. So you truly accumulate wasted hours over time and start shedding preparation as you go.

The time pressure could force you to cut corners, not because you don't care, but because you have to: from a whole day psychoanalyzing faculty to a passerby glance at the website and praying that there are commonalities across all schools nonspecific enough to work with whatever (hopefully) unoffensive claims you're making in your writing. As time passes and you realize you are going to start being late, you have to pick up the pace, and the more schools you have, the more early and quickly the process degrades.

I have to tell you I was very confident: I would consider myself on the humanistic side and I love to write and argue, but I didn't know what I didn't know at the time. The kind of cognitive bandwidth you need to have to write hundreds of individually tailored essays over the course of, sometimes, just 2 weeks - 1 month was not sustainable for me. I started off strong but I would say well over half of my applications were donations because they were poorly researched and poorly written.

So the goal here is not for you to add DO schools to a big MD list. What I would do in your shoes is consider giving up whatever longshot MD schools you have not yet sent secondaries to and abandon them completely in favor of schools you are still early enough in the cycle to be genuinely considered at.

Good to know. Thank you for taking the time to write all this advice out!
I had like 5 secondaries left (out of 29) but it's as you said -- I can physically feel my writing quality dropping off and I think it's time to stop. The earliest ones I submitted were around 8/5-8/11 (one of which is my state school, which already seems to have a slower cycle), so I'm holding onto hope. That said, it's been exhausting, and I think I'll welcome having a few months to clear my head after this summer and before possibly reapplying. I will take everything you've shared into consideration for the future.