By Carleen Eaton, M.D.

You thrive on deadlines. Fueled by coffee, with just hours remaining until your 20 page paper on “Medieval Jousts as a Foreshadowing Device in Early 17th Century French Literature” is due, you are intensely focused, pounding away full speed at the keyboard. While you can pull this off with a paper in school, this last minute approach is definitely not recommended for med school applications. The reason: rolling admissions.

With rolling admissions, the schools do not wait until all of the applications are in to review them; they review them as they come in. Following committee review, competitive applicants are offered interviews. Acceptances are offered as early as October 15. As slots fill up in the class, the process becomes increasingly competitive for the remaining applicants. By spring, some schools are interviewing for the wait list only. Therefore, applying late in the cycle can have a detrimental effect on your chances of admission.

So how early is early enough? AAMCAS begins accepting applications on, or very close to, June 1. Ideally, you will have your primary application submitted by July 1. Once it gets to late August, or especially September, some schools are already interviewing.

Now that you know when to apply, the question is how do you get your application submitted early? With some organization and discipline, you can get this done while still maintaining your grades and an outside life. Just watch out for these pitfalls:

1. Waiting too long to ask for letters of recommendation - LOR are the part of the process over which you have the least amount of control. You can volunteer in five hospitals, study non-stop for the MCAT and achieve a GPA worthy of summa cum laude, all through your own initiative and effort, but you can’t make a very busy professor write a LOR at the last minute. To avoid being stuck waiting for a needed letter, request your letters at least four weeks in advance.

2. Not reviewing copies of your transcripts - Request a copy of your transcript from your each college you have attended and read every word of them. I have encountered situations where applicants found errors on their transcripts that needed to be corrected before they could submit them. This can cause a delay of weeks or longer, depending on the error and the school.

3. Giving yourself too little time to write the personal statement - Writing about oneself is hard. It is even harder when you only have 5300 characters in which to do so, while also trying to explain exactly why you want to be a doctor. Plan to spend a month on this. That way, you can work on it, and then set it aside for a few days between drafts in order to generate ideas.

4. Not realizing that it takes many hours to fill out the application - The fact that the instruction book for the AMCAS application is over 100 pages says it all.

So, while getting into the flow state with your espresso and your laptop might work to crank out that history paper, don’t try it with the application. Start early, finish early and leave the adrenaline rush of hitting “submit” one minute before the deadline to someone else.

By Carleen Eaton, M.D.

After months of chasing down transcripts, filling out applications and checking to make sure that your letters of recommendation were finally sent, you are ready to hear something – anything, back from the schools. News could arrive as early as the coming weeks since some schools begin notifying applicants about invitations to interview in early to mid-August.  If you submitted your primary and secondary applications early in the cycle, you could be hearing some news within the next month. If you don’t, don’t panic; it is still just the start of the season and schools can take months to review applications, with the pace of interviews picking up in the fall and on into winter. The good news can come in the form of an e-mail or regular mail and will either state a specific date for the interview, offer you a choice of dates or instruct you to contact the school to schedule your interview.

This part of the application process is actually pretty enjoyable. You will have the chance to visit the school, possibly see a new city and to imagine what it would be like to attend the school as a med student in the fall of 2011. Even before you have that first interview in hand, there are steps you can take to prepare for when it does arrive. In a lull between waves of secondary applications, take some time to do the following:

- Familiarize yourself with each school and be ready to explain to an interviewer why you are interested in the school.

-Review your application and formulate a response to address any weaknesses on the application you may be asked about.

-Be ready to discuss any part of the application, no matter how minor. An interviewer may just gloss past the senior thesis you recently completed and focus on the pottery class you took four years ago.

-Practice your interviewing skills with a mentor, advisor or friend.  By doing a practice interview early on, you have time to address any weaknesses in your presentation or verbal tics like saying “um” during every silence. Then, closer to interview day, you can put the final polish on your responses.

Once you see the long awaited words “Congratulations, you are invited to interview at ___ School of Medicine” you should go out, have fun and enjoy the moment.  When you are done celebrating, then it is time to do some shopping.  After all, the interview is the one step of the application process that can’t be completed on your computer in your most comfortable jeans and a t-shirt.

By Carleen Eaton, M.D.

The interview day tour is exciting. Walking the halls of the medical school, you really start envisioning yourself as a med student, short white coat swishing behind you (okay, so the short coats don’t “swish” the way the long ones the doctors wear do, but it’s a start.) The med student tour guide points out the anatomy lab, the library, and of course, the hospital cafeteria, encouraging the group to ask questions all the while. You figure you should ask a question and are about to go for it – when another applicant pipes up and “takes” the single good question you had ready to go.

The problem is, you spent all of your time preparing to answer questions and didn’t think about what to ask. After all, you just want to get in somewhere and aren’t too worried about the details as long as you get an acceptance letter.

However, there is something you might have overlooked:

You may get multiple acceptances.

This thought may seem truly amazing right now, since one acceptance seems nearly impossible. The admissions process breeds insecurity: thousands of applicants, much waiting and many rumors. However, if you are a strong applicant and applied to a wide range of schools, you could have some have some serious decisions to make and you are going to need the information you have gathered on interview day in order to make the best choice.  Unless you fly around the country for a second look at the programs, interview day may be the only time you visit the schools.  This means that you need to think seriously about what it would be like to spend four years at a school. Which one is going to the best place for you professionally and personally?

To figure this out, here are a few questions to ask yourself, the med students, your interviewer or the admissions office:

Do the medical students seem happy?

Is there a sense of camaraderie, or one of competition, among students?

Are med students assigned an advisor or mentor?

Is there a convenient, safe area nearby where students live?

Are the clinical sites busy enough that students can get plenty of hands-on experience?

How are students evaluated during the clinical years?

What kinds of support services are available to students?

Does the school emphasize primary care? Research?  Particular specialties?

What settings are available for clinical rotations?  Private hospitals, county hospitals, VA facilities?

And anything else that would impact your decision about where to go.

Besides giving you valuable information that will need in the near future, having these questions in mind will give you something else to think about besides “Will I get accepted?” as you stroll through the halls of the school.   And one last thing - checking out the med schools can be pretty fun ( yes, I know “fun” and “applying to med school” don’t sound like they go together) so try enjoy yourself at least a bit!