The Process

I’m sure many of you are blessed to not have the desire to become a doctor and therefore don’t know what the application process is like. Here is a look at what goes on:

After you take the MCAT, pass all of those classes med schools like, and convince a few professors that they actually remember you and should write a recommendation for you, you have to fill out the AMCAS (American Medical College Application Service) application. The vast majority of US med schools use this service and it seems like a great idea. The application is pretty involved, but you only have to answer one long essay question (Why do you want to be a doctor?) and they send your application and letters of recommendation to every school you indicate for a nominal fee (read hundreds and hundreds of dollars). And, that’s that.

Only that’s not that. Med schools then receive your application and decide to send you a secondary application. It used to be that med schools would weed out some applicants between the AMCAS application and the secondary, but I’m fairly certain that now the majority of schools simply invite everyone who is interested to fill out a secondary. Oh, by the way, that will run you roughly one hundred dollars per secondary.

Then the real weeding out process starts. Schools decide to invite a select group of applicants for an interview, and then you agonize for a few months before they reject or accept you.