<p>My school works like this:
- collect as many recommendations you want, at least 3 (I had 8) and have them sent to the honors college [March-June]
- once all are received, schedule a 1h interview with the dean of the honors college and your honors college advisor [first week of August]
- participate in said interivew to give the dean more material for his section of your composite letter (he doesn’t know everyone that well, but he does know me very well) [mid-August]
- dean + advisor write composite letter with quotes from other letters, and attach the other letters to it too. Then it’s off to interfolio or AMCAS or whatever to be distributed to your med schools [end of August]</p>
<p>This timeline isn’t very flexible at my school. The earliest you can schedule your interview is the first week of August–I believe this is because they’re busy with kids applying to EDP programs until then.</p>
<p>I submitted AMCAS the first week of July, my rec letters in mid-August, and had finished secondaries by mid-September (except Duke, waited until mid-November for that one). Still haven’t heard from most of the schools I applied to (Boston, Creighton, Drexel, Harvard, Loyola, SLU, Tufts, UVA)–perhaps in part because of my “late” rec letters.</p>
<p>If I were doing it all over again, I’d politely insist that my committee interview take place in June and I probably wouldn’t stop until they agreed. For whatever reason, it seems like many advisors just don’t get it that the timing of this process is like, everything, and that a few months really does make a big difference. I wouldn’t wait until August for my letters unless I had to retake the MCAT in August and thus was applying later than I originally intended.</p>
<p>Just my $0.02</p>