You Submitted Your Application. Now What?

Somewhere right now, a pre-med is refreshing their inbox waiting for secondary invites to roll in.

In another town, someone is staring at their first secondary prompt wondering where to start.

Across the country, in various bedrooms and campus apartments, thousands of applicants are running the same mental math: their GPA against a school’s average, their MCAT against the median, their clinical hours against whatever number they found on some Reddit thread.

I’ve watched students do this for 15 years. It makes them worse applicants.

Don’t get me wrong - you need to make secondary essays a priority and turn them back quickly to schools (potentially your sole focus until about mid-July).

But don’t rest on your laurels or look in the rearview mirror too much after you turn in secondaries. It’s easy to have an application hangover or think about what-ifs. However, you’re much better off focusing on the present and future. 

WHY DWELLING ON THE PAST CAN BACKFIRE

By the time you’re sitting across from an interviewer in October or November, you need something going on in your life that isn’t your AMCAS application. A good interviewer will figure  this out fast, one way or another. 

Imagine: they ask you about yourself. You pivot everything back to your clinical experiences, your research, your volunteering. You have nothing new to share, and nothing to discuss beyond the bounds of your previous resume.

The applicants who stand out in interviews are the ones who seem like they truly inhabit their lives, with a focus on the present and future. They’ve done new things and noticed new things and have new opinions about things that have nothing to do with their application.

I’ve worked with applicants who spent their entire pre-interview season in obsessive application mode, and oppositely, applicants who gave themselves permission to breathe, explore, and expand on what they had already built. The second group holds up better when interviews stack up in the fall. They’re also more interesting to talk to.

WHAT TO ACTUALLY DO THIS SUMMER

Get back into something that has nothing to do with medicine.

If you’ve spent three years doing nothing but pre-med activities, you’ve probably gotten a bit flat. A good interviewer will notice.

One of my past students started doing long-distance cycling trips the summer before his interviews. Not to list as an activity, just something he wanted to do. He told me it gave him more real things to talk about than anything else in his application. His interviewers agreed. He got into multiple schools.

Read something long and not medical.

Medical school interviews involve a lot of conversations about perspective on things outside medicine: healthcare systems, ethics, how people actually live. Pre-meds who’ve only read papers and review articles for a few years sometimes struggle here because they haven’t had to hold a real opinion about anything outside their field in a while.

Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s about a team of engineers at a computer company in the late 1970s, racing to build a new machine against an impossible deadline. It has nothing to do with medicine. It’s about obsession, team dynamics, and what happens to people who care desperately about something hard. One of my students read it the summer before interviews and said it gave him more to talk about than anything he’d done in a lab. Read something. Read Kidder if you want a place to start.

Put yourself somewhere genuinely uncomfortable.

One student I worked with had spent most of undergrad in a tight pre-med bubble. Before her interview season, I pushed her to sign up for an improv comedy class at a local theater. She thought I was joking. She pushed back. Eight weeks later she was doing a short set in front of a room full of strangers. By the time interviews came around, she told me it taught her more about thinking on her feet and reading a room than anything she’d done in a clinical setting. Every one of her interviewers picked up on something, even if they couldn’t have said exactly what.

Build on a strength.

If there’s already something in your application you’re proud of, this is the summer to go deeper into it, not just maintain it. The student who has been doing consistent research doesn’t need to start something new, but might use this time to actually write something up or present findings somewhere. The one with strong community health involvement might step into a coordination role. The goal isn’t another line item. It’s to have something new to say about something you were already doing well.

Rectify a weakness.

Most applicants already know where their application is thin. If there’s a gap you’ve been quietly hoping nobody would notice, this is the time to actually do something about it. Not frantically, not performatively, but thoughtfully. A student who applied without much exposure to a specific patient population, or who has been meaning to get involved in something community-facing, has real time to change that before interviews start. The goal isn’t to manufacture a story. It’s to fill a gap you already knew was there.

Take a real break.

Put down the MSAR, close the laptop, go somewhere that isn’t a library or a hospital. A weekend trip. A long drive. Applicants who never let themselves decompress hit a wall in the Fall, right when interviews are at their busiest. I’ve watched this happen enough times that I’m not guessing anymore.

Submitting your application isn’t a finish line, but it is a huge milestone of your pre-med career, and it’s worth taking a moment to feel good about that. But the real challenge starts now.

The students who show up to interviews with something real to say are the ones who treated this summer as a prompt: to do something, read something, fix something, build on something. Not because it would look good on a form. Because that’s who they’re trying to become.

‍