Tips for Approaching AMCAS Primary Application
Written by: Nick Asmus, Pre-Health Peer Advisor
Primary applications for MD schools are filled out and submitted in the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS). This portal can be intimidating and remains elusive to many pre-med students leading up to the application cycle; the AAMC provides an AMCAS guide that is useful, but is long, dense, and unrealistic to read through beginning to end. In this blog post, I present the main components of the AMCAS application concisely and with guidance from my own experience preparing for this step in the journey towards medical school.
Work/Activities
In this section, you can list up to 15 extracurricular experiences with 700 character maximum (including spaces) to summarize each experience, as well as the number of hours devoted to the activity/experience and the start/end dates. This is your opportunity to display everything you’ve been doing outside of the classroom throughout your college years including volunteering, research, work, clubs, hobbies, projects, etc. You will also be required to identify three of your experiences as “most meaningful,” and will be given additional space to explain why.
One thing, I would like to emphasize about this section is that, although quantity of hours is important for demonstrating dedication, it is the transformative nature of the experience that is most important to present via the summary section. During the months leading up to the application cycle, it will be helpful to reflect on your experiences and ask yourself questions such as, what skills do I have now that I didn’t prior to an experience? How did this experience further solidify my interest in medicine? What impact did this experience have on myself and those around me?
Letters of Evaluation
AMCAS allows you to upload up to 10 letters of recommendation; this does not mean that you will have to submit 10 letters, though. It is recommended to receive 5-7 letters from individuals who know you in different contexts, professionally and personally. Most medical schools will request 3-5 letters and sometimes have requirements for who the letters need to come from, such as science faculty, non-science faculty, healthcare professionals, someone who worked with you in a professional setting, etc. You can find these requirements on the website for each individual medical school or on AAMC’s Medical School Admission Requirements (MSAR) website.
Some students struggle to find clarity in who to ask for a letter of recommendation, and it is common to approach a professor simply because they performed well in their class; however this can be a mistake. You want your letters of recommendation to reflect your characteristics, skills, and attributes beyond academic performance; you should seek individuals who know you personally and can speak to your personal traits such as integrity, professionalism, and personability.
Another valuable tip I’d like to share from my own experience is to provide your letter writers with supplementary documents that will help out with writing a good letter. For example, it will be valuable to provide each letter writer with the AAMC’s Guidelines for Writing a Letter of Evaluation for a Medical School Applicant; this gives your letter writer basic knowledge of what medical schools are looking for in the letter that they will be writing about you. I would also recommend supplying them with a document of a list of activities, experiences, and accomplishments in the form of a CV and/or resume; this may allow them to instill more depth into your letter by drawing off your experiences and achievements.
Medical Schools
This is the section where you enter the medical schools you want to submit your primary application to. Data shows that your likelihood of getting a medical school acceptance increases with the number of schools you apply to up until 18 schools, and the curve plateaus from there. It is therefore recommended to apply to around this many schools, but this number can vary depending on your situation. While making a list of schools to apply to, many students ask themselves: how do I know how likely I am to get into a school? How should I balance between applying to lower- and higher-ranking schools? What other components are there to consider?
When considering your competitiveness for a school, consider how your academic stats compare with the average stats of the matriculants and how well you align with the school’s mission. You’re going to be safest applying to schools with an average matriculating MCAT and GPA close to yours or lower, and that has a mission that aligns closely with your experiences and values. However, regarding academic stats, it’s important to keep in mind that you’re only seeing the average, and there are plenty of students that got accepted with an MCAT and GPA below that average, so don’t hesitate to apply schools that have average academic stats higher than yours.
Another factor to consider is the percentage of in-state/out-of-state students each school accepts. Some public schools accept up to 90% in-state students, and it would therefore not be worth applying to an out-of-state school with this acceptance data given you’ll likely be rejected simply because of your residency. There are plenty of other factors to consider such as tuition, class size, and demographics that you can find on the medical school’s website or on AAMC’s Medical School Admission Requirements (MSAR), which concisely displays this information for each school. A one-year subscription for MSAR costs $28.
Essays
You will be required to upload a personal statement to AMCAS; the AAMC presents the following questions to address in your personal statement:
“Why have you selected the field of medicine?”
“What motivates you to learn more about medicine?”
“What do you want medical schools to know about you that has not been disclosed in other sections of the application?”
What makes the personal statement so important is that it’s your first opportunity to display to medical schools who you are as a person, such as your strengths and characteristics, as well as presenting the reason that you want to pursue a career as a physician. Medical schools will look beyond how you performed academically; they want to invite students to their programs who have qualities such as leadership, compassion, and perseverance, and it is this essay that is your chance first to inform the programs you’re applying to about these traits of yours.
The personal statement has a word limit of 5,300 characters (including spaces) which comes out to about a page of writing; the challenge of this essay is thoroughly addressing the previously displayed questions in such a limited quantity of space. The best advice I can give is to start early! Give yourself a few months before you apply to start writing; it will inevitably take multiple drafts to nail down your personal statement to the quality necessary to get accepted to medical schools. Building off this tip: have other people proofread your statement. I recommend going to professionals who have experience working with pre-health students, such as an advisor or professor, and ideally ones that know you well personally.
Standardized Tests
The MCAT is one of the most, if not the most, notorious requirements for applying to medical schools. The MCAT does not just assess your general academic capabilities, but also how dedicated you are as an applicant. Being smart is not enough to succeed on this exam; it takes a lot of effort to understand the exam and its algorithms, which of course requires a lot of time. It is also a great opportunity to practice for what’s to come in the following years in medical school, such as boarding exams and difficult tests. However, do not let this exam define you as an applicant; there are plenty of applicants that score average or lower on the MCAT that are successful during the application cycle because of their strengths in the previously described components in the AMCAS application.
The MCAT is also not the only standardized test that you might be required to take. Some medical schools will recommend or require you to take what’s called a situational judgment test, which will be either AAMC’s PREview exam or the Casper exam. These exams assess personal and professional competencies such as teamwork, empathy, and rationality by asking scenario-based questions. The AAMC says that students typically spend 1-5 hours preparing for this exam to ensure they are familiar with the exam structure and that their set up at home is appropriate for online testing (unlike the MCAT, this exam is taken and proctored online and at home).
Conclusion
No single section in the AMCAS application will guarantee your success or failure in the medical school application cycle; it is important to be balanced among all these components discussed in this blog post to be a competitive applicant. Being familiar with what you will be required to upload and display when the application cycle comes around will give you the opportunity to be more prepared when that time comes in the summer. I hope that these summaries and tips from my own experience can serve as a useful guide in your journey towards medical school applications and acceptance!
