If You Only Do 3 Things Before May, Make It These

Applications open in a matter of weeks. If you're reading this in mid-April, you are not behind. But you are at the point where a small amount of focused effort now will save you from a genuinely miserable June.

I'm not going to sugarcoat what's coming. The medical school application process is a multi-month endurance test, and it has a way of expanding to fill every available hour of your life. The students who navigate it well aren't necessarily the ones with the best stats. They're the ones who walked into May with a plan.

So here are three things to do before the floodgates open.

1. Get a working draft of your personal statement

Not a perfect draft. Not a final draft. A draft that exists outside of your head, on a screen, in sentences that another human being can read and respond to.

Why now? Because you're going to need to hand this essay to the people writing your letters of recommendation. They need to understand your story in order to write compellingly about you, and "I'll send it to you soon" is a promise that will haunt you in May when you're juggling ten other things.

Here's the other reason: you will keep rewriting this essay. Probably several times. The version you submit at the end of May will look different from what you write this week, and that's fine. First drafts are not supposed to be good. They're supposed to be done. The act of writing a bad first draft is what makes the second draft possible, and the third draft is usually where the real essay starts to show up.

If you're staring at a blank page, start with one question: what is the single most important thing you want an admissions committee to understand about why you want to be a doctor? Write your answer in plain language, as if you were telling a friend over coffee. That's your starting point. Everything else is editing.

2. Start researching schools (even though you don't have all the information yet)

I know what you're thinking. "I don't have my MCAT score back yet." Or: "I'll figure out my school list later." This is understandable. It's also a trap.

You don't need a finalized school list right now. What you need is to start getting familiar with the landscape so that when the time comes to build that list, you're not starting from zero.

Two specific things to do:

Look at secondary essay prompts. Most schools send secondary applications after you submit your primary, and many of them ask the same questions year after year. These prompts are publicly available (sites like StudentDoctorNetwork compile them), and they are a goldmine. They tell you, in the admissions committee's own words, what that school actually cares about. A school that asks you to write about health policy is telling you something different from a school that asks about your experience with underserved communities. Start reading these now, and you'll begin to develop an intuition for which schools are a genuine fit, not just a name on a list.

Open the MSAR. The Medical School Admission Requirements database is the most comprehensive source of admissions data available, and most applicants either never look at it or look at it too late. It contains median MCAT scores, GPA ranges, class sizes, mission statements, and a dozen other data points for every accredited medical school in the country. You don't need to build a spreadsheet today. But spend an hour browsing. Get a feel for what's in there and how the numbers vary. This is reconnaissance, not commitment.

3. Follow up with your letter of recommendation writers

If you've already asked someone to write you a letter, now is the time to check in. If you haven't asked yet, this week would be a very good week to do it.

Letters of recommendation are not due until July, and there is a mechanism to update them after you submit your application in May. So you might be tempted to think this can wait. It cannot.

Here is what happens in May: your letter writers, who are also professors and clinicians and human beings with their own calendars, suddenly receive a wave of requests from every pre-med student they've ever mentored. Final exams need grading. Committee meetings pile up. And then summer arrives, and some of them leave town entirely. The professor who enthusiastically agreed to write your letter in February may be genuinely difficult to reach by June.

Following up now accomplishes two things. First, it puts you back on their radar before the rush. Second, it gives you the chance to share your personal statement draft (see item one above), which makes their job easier and your letter stronger. A recommender who understands your narrative can write a letter that reinforces it. A recommender working from memory alone will write something generic, and generic letters don't move the needle.

A brief, polite email is all this requires. Thank them for agreeing to write on your behalf, let them know when the letter will be due, and offer to send any materials that might be helpful. That's it. You are not being a burden. You are being organized, which is a quality that will serve you well for the rest of your career.

You got this.

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