After you’ve submitted your medical school application, you might spend a lot of time waiting. That might involve waiting for an interview invitation or waiting to hear after you’ve had your first or fifth interview. This waiting period can be really anxiety-provoking, but try to remind yourself that you’ve done all you can, and it’s out of your hands now. You should be proud of all you’ve done so far to get to this point.
Prep for Interviews
If you have an interview coming up, time to prep for it! If you haven’t received an interview invitation yet, there’s still time! Prep some now so that you feel ready when that invite does come in. When you feel ready to do some more intense interview prep, we can help you out with mock interviews.
Keep Up with Your Coursework
If you’re still in classes right now, make sure to keep up with your coursework and keep your grades up. Don’t make yourself miserable trying to be perfect; just continue to do your best. When you matriculate into medical school, the school will need to see that you’ve passed all of your remaining coursework.
Often, your acceptance will actually be contingent on your continued academic performance and not having any misdemeanors or academic violations before beginning medical school.
Send Update Letters
If anything big has happened since you’ve submitted your application, it might be a good idea to send an update letter! There are a few key things to keep in mind when deciding whether to send an update letter or letter of intent.
The main thing to consider is whether the school accepts them at all. You also want to save update letters for big updates that you think might significantly change how a school evaluates your application. Learn even more about whether you should send an update letter and how to do it here.
A letter of intent has the most impact after you have interviewed with the school and are either waiting to hear from them or have been waitlisted.
Make Use of Your Free Time!
The time that you spend prepping for the MCAT, writing your primary application, and writing your secondary applications is an incredibly busy time in your life. Even if you’re still in school during the application cycle, you might have more free time post-submission than you’ve had in a long time. This is especially true if you’re spending the application cycle in a gap year.
It can be tempting to try to “prepare” for medical school or preemptively prepare for reapplying, but as premeds, you get so few opportunities to enjoy free time guilt and anxiety free, so you should take them when presented to you.
Evaluate Your Application
While you shouldn’t start tearing apart your application as soon as you’ve submitted it, there does come a point where it’s a good idea to critically evaluate your application so you’re prepared if you need to reapply. We generally advise beginning to consider reapplying if you haven’t received any interviews by Thanksgiving. This doesn’t mean you should give up hope, and plenty of students receive interviews and acceptances after this point. We use this time of year as an indicator to consider reapplying so that you have time to be fully prepared and to have worked on any issues in your application by the time the next cycle opens up.
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