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inGenius Prep

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Look through our full article on SDN here! The Art of Writing Med School Secondaries - Student Doctor Network

5 Tips You Must Implement on your Secondaries

There are tons of articles explaining the generic to-do’s and not-to-do’s for secondaries, so I won’t spend a ton of time on them. There are, however, a few not-so-basic points that everyone should follow.

1. Think Like an Admissions Committee.

Many adcoms are made up of professors and students. You must write to please that particular audience. If you suspect that one of your would-be peers would read your application and say, “I would hate to be with this person in class,” you’re in trouble. No amount of qualification or credentialing can save you if your prospective peers and professors think you would be a pain in the butt in class.

Moreover, these people have to read hundreds of essays, so keep your vocabulary simple and your sentences short. As you may have heard, medical students and doctors are not always known for their reading comprehension skills.

Try to keep sentences under 15 words, where possible.

Don’t use big words if a smaller word will suffice.

Finally, these are humans reading your essays, and as such, they will get insanely bored reading applications, 75% of which sound identical. Their eyes will inevitably glaze over. Thus, you need to grab their attention, particularly with your opening sentences.

The best medical school essay I ever read began with: “Nobody cares when someone dies in Cape Town.” That is a sentence that grabs the reader. While not every essay can begin with a mic-dropping opener, you should still remember that part of your job is to keep your audience engaged.

2. Do Not Repeat Yourself. I Repeat: Do Not Repeat Yourself

The adcom already has your AMCAS application. Repetition will not help you at all. You need to be providing new information. That doesn’t mean that you cannot talk about the same activities or experiences—you certainly can. It means that you need to discuss another angle of that particular experience.

For instance, if you previously discussed the ways your humanitarian work changed your priorities, perhaps you could now discuss the ways your humanitarian work influenced your interest in a particular practice area, such as epidemiology or plastic surgery.

3. There are Two Themes—Yours and the School’s—and You Must Maintain Both.

Theme #1: The first theme is yours. We call it the Application Persona, some people call it a “hook,” or a “personal narrative,” but ultimately it is the catchphrase that the adcom will use to remember and describe your application. That persona should be woven into your secondary essays in the same way it was woven into your AMCAS application.

Theme #2: Complicating matters is our second theme: the theme of the institution. Every institution has a “thing” it is known for. Often times, it’s on their “About This School” page on their website. Sometimes, they will go the extra mile and build it right into the application, such as Johns Hopkins, which opened their secondary application with this paragraph:

“Ranked at the top for research, Johns Hopkins Medical School provides a medical education with an emphasis on integrating scientific innovation in patient care. The school’s mission statement shares a comprehensive and long-term perspective on medical education, touching on: The Science and Practice of Medicine, Clinical Competence, The Social Context of Medicine, Communication, Professionalism and Lifelong Learning. Given these tenets, describe how your background and experience has prepared you to excel in these areas as you write your secondary essays.”

Thus, Hopkins has announced its theme. Before you start writing, you need to think carefully about how your theme interacts with the school—basically, the common area on the Venn diagram of medical practice and research, where your uniqueness and their uniqueness combine to produce something more than their constituent parts.

4. Answer the Prompt Directly.

Too many people get caught up in what they want to say, and completely fail to answer the question. Make sure your answer is directly responsive to the question and doesn’t take any significant detours.

5. Be Consistent with your AMCAS Application.

I don’t just mean your theme. I mean don’t write anything that contradicts or otherwise calls into question something you wrote on your AMCAS. And off of that point, don’t write about anything you can’t speak about in depth during your interviews. Be consistent.

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