application instructions

The medical school application process

Note: this page is intented to provide you, the medical school applicant, with a general outline of the procedures that you'll be going through as you apply to medical schools. It does not in any way cover all of the details - it is your responsibility to read carefully and understand the AMCAS instruction book, available as a pdf on the AMCAS website as well as the instructions on the admissions websites of any schools to which you are planning to apply.

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 the spring of your junior year - you will go through essentially the same process described below, but things will have to get started 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.

The two University of Minnesota schools of medicine, at the Twin Cities and Duluth campuses, have a common AMCAS designation, which you should select whether you want to apply to Duluth, Twin Cities, or both. Once you send in your AMCAS application, you will receive an email with a link where you can select which campus you want to apply to.

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) generally becomes available early in the summer in the year prior to the year that you are applying for (in other words, about 15 months in advance of the start of a new medical school class). 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 - before Labor Day. This especially applies to Duluth, which gets going early on rolling admissions. You can send in your AMCAS application before you know your MCAT scores - all new scores are forwarded to AMCAS and from them to the schools to which you are applying.

Also: as soon as you register for the AMCAS, go ahead and enter your grades 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 (with all grades entered and verified, and at least one MCAT score on record), 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. 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

Medical school admissions committees generally consider letters of recommendation along with secondary applications - therefore, you will submit your AMCAS application before recommenders send any letters. Recommenders send their letter to AMCAS, and ASCAS distributes the letters to the medical schools. You tell AMCAS which letters you want send where. There are three types of recommendations:

1) Letters from individuals (eg. from a supervisor, or a doctor you shadowed)

2) Premed Committee letters

3) Premed Committee packets

The UMM premed committee sends type 2, a committee letter. You are not obliged to have a committee letter, but in most cases it is probably to your advantage to have one in your application. In your AMCAS application, there is a section where you list the letters being written on your behalf - be sure to designate our letter as a committee letter. Letter requirements vary among different schools - most require one or sometimes two individual letters in addition to the committee letter. In addition to the letter from the premed advising committee, you should also arrange for individual letters from two other people. Overall, it is best if your set of letters is diverse, with recommendations from science and non-science professors, job/internship/volunteer supervisors, etc. You can add/change letter assignments after you submit your AMCAS (but the letters themselves cannot be edited once submitted by the recommender).

Sometimes is gets a little complicated: for example, UM-Duluth wants either three individual letters or a committee letter - if you send a committee letter to them, they will not accept any additional letters. It would be to your advantage here to have a special version of the committee letter just for Duluth, one that includes input from your other letter writers. Everyone's situation will be different, depending on the set of letters they have written for them and also on which schools they are applying to. You can work out the best strategy with your UMM premed committee letter coordinator (see below).

In the fall semester you will be asked to meet with the premed committee for an informal 30 minute 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. Once you have completed and submitted your AMCAS application, and at least one set of MCAT scores are recorded, you should contact me and I will set up an interview time for you. I will also ask you for a printout of your AMCAS application. Interviews will not be held be held until mid-August at the earliest (after faculty return for the fall semester), and most commonly will be scheduled in early-mid September.

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 committee letter. All of your subsequent correspondence regarding your committee letter should be with this 'letter coordinator '. At this point you should go into your AMCAS file and assign the letter coordinator's name to the letter (or letters) that the committee write for you. You will also need to provide your letter coordinator with an 'AMCAS letter request form' which will have an identifying letter ID number and barcode. You can print these out from your AMCAS file. If you need to have more than one version of the committee letter to send to different schools, each version will need its own letter eequest form and letter ID number. Finally, some schools may have an addition recommendation form, which you will need to provide to your 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.

Finally, you are ultimately responsible for making sure that your medical school application files are complete. Always confirm with your committee letter coordinator (and also your other individual letter writers) that letters have been sent to AMCAS, and always confirm directly with each medical school admissions office that all letters/forms have arrived and have been put in your file . Most admissions offices now have a website that allows you to track the progress of your application file, and see what is there and what is missing.