The medical school application process

The application process begins in the summer one year before you plan to enter medical school. Therefore, if you plan to go straight to medical school in the fall after you graduate from UMM, you will be taking your MCAT in the spring of your junior year (or possibly later that August, but this is not recommended), and applying late that summer. If you are thinking about applying early decision, be sure to talk with Tim Soderberg at least by January of your junior year - you will go through essentially the same process described below, but things will have to happen much earlier.

The AMCAS application

The first first application you will fill out is the AMCAS application. AMCAS, or The American Medical College Application Service, is "a non-profit, centralized application processing service for applicants to the first-year entering classes at participating U.S. medical schools". (See the AMCAS website). This will involve your telling them every last detail (well, almost) of your life, including all of your classes and grades and a 'personal statement', an open-ended essay that is a very important factor in the admissions process. The good news is that regardless of how many schools you apply to you only have to fill this first application out once. You specify schools to which you want to apply, and AMCAS forwards your application and MCAT scores to the appropriate admissions offices. There is a (rather large) fee for the first school and a smaller fee for each school after that. There are some non-AMCAS schools (like U. North Dakota) for which you will need to apply individually. Osteopathy schools are not included in AMCAS.

The AMCAS website will provide you with the details you need but here are some important points that you should keep in mind:

1) Timeline: The AMCAS web-based application system (there is no paper system anymore) will become available in early May, according to their website. Many medical schools (including Twin Cities and Duluth) have rolling admissions, meaning that students are being accepted long before any official application deadline. What this means is, get your AMCAS application in early - well before Labor Day. This especially applies to Duluth, which gets going early on rolling admissions.

Also: as soon as you register for the AMCAS, go ahead and arrange to have your transcripts sent in for verification. You don't need to have your entire application completed to do this, and verification of transcipts can take a long time and hold up your application.

2) The personal statement: Don't whip this off the night before you send off your application - consider it to be a continuous process, with many reviews and revisions. Get lots of feedback from lots of people - the more the better. This is a very difficult but critical essay - maybe one of the most important things you will ever write. If you haven't started it already, start as soon as you have recovered from MCAT and finals. There is no one way to write a good personal statement, but a good place to start is to try to tell the story of how you became interested in being a doctor: describe important events that took place in some of your academic or nonacademic experiences and how they influenced your decision. Be specific and concrete! Talk about specific experiences and exactly what you learned from them. Avoid cliches. Be organized - remember that little guy called the paragraph.

The secondary application

If, after reviewing your AMCAS application, a school decides that you meet the minimum criteria for admission, they will then send you a "secondary application", and you will have the opportunity to fill out more forms, write more essays, and pay more money. Often, they will give a about four weeks to get your secondary application in. This is also the point at which you arrange to have letters of recommendation sent to schools from whom you have received a secondary application. After receiving your secondary application and letters of recommendation, the school's admissions committee will evaluate it and decide whether or not to invite you for an interview.

Letters of recommendation

Most medical schools prefer to receive, in addition to letters from individual faculty members/supervisors, a letter from your undergraduate institution's premedical advising committee. You are not obliged to have a committee letter (in other words, you could ask individual faculty members to write letters and avoid us altogether), but it helps to have a committee letter.

Very early in the fall semester (typically during the second week of classes) we will ask you to meet with us, probably in the evening, for an informal 20-30 minute interview. It is possible that faculty members from other divisions as well as a local doctor or two may also be sitting in to help us with the interview. This is an opportunity for you to tell us more about yourself, and for us to ask a few pointed questions about your strengths, weaknesses, motivations, activities, etc. This process will help us immensely when we sit down to write your recommendation letter. I will contact you by email in the first week of classes to set up your interview slot. I will also ask you for a printout of your AMCAS application (which, of course, you have already submitted in mid-August).

In addition to the letter from the premed advising committee, you should also arrange to have letters from two or three other people (see your secondary applications for exact instructions - they vary with each school). Overall, it is best if your set of letters is diverse, with recommendations from science and non-science professors, job/internship/volunteer supervisors, etc. For UM-Duluth, you may send only one individual letter in addition to the committee letter. For UMTC you should have three individual letters in addition to the committee letter. Schools generally want letters to be mailed directly from the recommenders, and many schools now have an online recommendation system.

Procedures for premed committee letters:

Shortly after you interview with the premed committee, the chair will appoint one of the committee members to coordinate the composition and mailing of your letter.   All of your subsequent correspondence regarding your committee letter should be with this 'letter coordinator '.

You may optionally send to your letter coordinator, shortly after the interview, the names of any UMM faculty/staff members who know you well and might be able to contribute to your committee letter. Your letter coordinator will contact these people and request input for your committee letter. Note : These names should not include people whom you plan to ask to write individual letters of recommendation.

Letters of recommendation are sent to medical schools at about the same time as secondary applications. At the time that you are ready to submit a secondary application, you should send an email to your letter coordinator requesting that a letter be sent to this school, giving the mailing address along with deadlines and any other pertinent instructions.   If there is a specific form that needs to accompany the letter, this form should also go to the letter coordinator - be sure to note this in your email!   If the med school has an electronic submission system for letters of recommendation, simply follow the instructions that you are given, and notify your letter coordinator that he/she will be receiving an email recommendation form.

Finally, ask your letter coordinator to confirm with you directly (email is easiest) each time a committee letter is submitted, so you both are on the same page and miscommunications do not occur.   Always confirm directly with each medical school admissions office that the letters/forms have arrived and have been put in your file .