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Best advice I can give anyone applying to medical school is make a dedicated email ONLY for applications. That way you don’t miss a single email and it’s easier to check the junk mail. It also prevents a mini heart attack any time your personal email gets new mail.
You can add it to your iPhone mail and when you see a notification from the email you know it has to do with medical school and you can prepare yourself mentally.
So I’m making this a thread apparently. Next I would personally suggest making that email a google one because of the google docs function and google sheets functions. If you don’t like those online functions it’s ok and find what works for you. This is what worked for me and why
First I chose a google email because I could creat google docs & share them with the individuals who were going to review every primary & secondary I wrote so it was just easier because there’s a “suggesting” option where you can see the edits they made & decide if you want them
Google sheets allowed me to track every school that I applied to. I had headings for: date primary sumbmitted, date secondary recieved, date secondary submitted, date secondary due, amount for secondary, interview date, then decision. Feel free to add more headings as you see fit
So above is why. Here’s how I tackled everything. For the PS I wrote it originally on one google doc and named it the “original” then I copied that doc and made a new one with “edit” in the title. So when I needed someone to make suggestions I would share the edit one
With them & they would press “suggesting” in the top right corner & make any corrections. When they were done I would share it with the next person until if felt my PS was strong & what I wanted it to be. That way if someone accidentally deleted something I always had my original
Then when it was done done I made a copy of the finished product into a new doc that only I had access to so that when I needed to copy and paste into AMCAS I could be sure it was the version that I thought it was if that makes sense. I did something similar for the activities
I wrote out all 15 or I think I did like 12 or something in one doc as the original, made a copy as the edit, then made a “final” completed one when it was all edited.
SECONDARIES: when I got my 20ish secondaries all on the same day when they process your app at AMCAS it can be overwhelming to keep track of. SO I made another doc lol
The SECOND the secondaries were in my inbox I went through each one and skipped to the essay portion. I then copied and pasted every essay prompt AND most importantly the word count and due date of the app into a google doc. I personally chose to organize that doc by due date
So the schools due first were at the top all the way to the schools that were due in January or latter at the bottom. I wrote the secondaries in any order I wanted but this way I knew which ones were due earlier than others and what i needed to complete quickly
So this way every secondary prompt is in one doc and you can easily control(or is it command) find key words if you end up remembering you had a similar prompt and needed to quickly see what you wrote. A lot better than having 30 different documents for 30 different schools imo
Then of course again I made an “edit” version. And “done/final” version. But for secondaries I did them periodically so it worked slightly differently. I would write out in the original document, writing which ever prompt I wanted but once I finished an entire schools prompts,
I would then COPY ONLY THAT SCHOOLS prompt and response into the edit document for secondaries and would text my editors that a new few paragraphs were available. They then would edit(I gave like 2 days for anyone who wanted to edit) then I would then CUT the edited version into
The “finished secondaries” doc only I had access to. This way if nothing is in the doc they know there is nothing there for them to edit. This would be a moving process ultimately. I would submit things as they were edited. I personally also use grammarly as a last check
Like once someone has edited and I’ve read over the secondary and liked how it sounded. I would then go to my email, find that secondary link, complete the info part of the secondary then put the prompt response in grammarly as a final check. And then I would submit the secondary
I made sure to track what date I submitted every secondary in the google sheets master list i made of all the schools so if I could always refer back and make sure to check in with schools I hadn’t heard from in a while
Just general advice for writing secondaries. Make sure you are reading the schools website while you are writing. Make sure what you are writing lines up with their mission which should also be similar to what you believe because you chose to apply there in the first place
More advice: LABEL IT ALL! Make sure you are making headings for the things you write. Like for activities. Label what it’s about so it’s easier to find. If it’s one of the 3 “meaningful” ones label it so you know in addition to 700 characters you’re gonna have to write 1300 more
For the secondaries, my labels within the doc were: Name of school(20 font bold) followed by due date (16 font) highlighted, then the prompt(12 font), followed by the word count right underneath the prompt. I did this for EVERY SCHOOL. Makes it easier to see within th single docs
If you highlight the paragraph there is a tool in google docs to see you character count. It might be off by positive or negative like 3 characters but that’s better than nothing.
I think that’s it. Feel free to DM me if you want. And if I keep getting the same questions I’ll just add the info here. I had no one to help me in this process & it got really overwhelming at certain points. If I knew what i knew now back then I would have been much more relaxed
These tweets are brought to you by neurotic organization which is somehow a talent of mind. I’m all about efficiency 
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😂" title="Face with tears of joy" aria-label="Emoji: Face with tears of joy">https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😂" title="Face with tears of joy" aria-label="Emoji: Face with tears of joy">https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😂" title="Face with tears of joy" aria-label="Emoji: Face with tears of joy"> doing things with the best quality and with easy functionality in the least amount of time. Things that are uneffecient make negative sense to me https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😭" title="Loudly crying face" aria-label="Emoji: Loudly crying face">https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="☠️" title="Skull and crossbones" aria-label="Emoji: Skull and crossbones">
