<p>I’m still waiting on a letter (ugh) from one of my science professors, is there any reason to turn in secondaries before my letters are all in? I’m still refining and polishing them, so I’m not sitting on them pointlessly, but I’ll turn them in if schools will frown on this.</p>
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<p>No, because without the LORs, you’d be turning in an incomplete secondary, and the school wouldn’t even look at it. Worse, it would be perceived as unprofessional. Wait until you have everything that was requested, and turn it in all at once.</p>
<p>Sounds good. But unprofessional? We no longer send letters in with our secondaries, all medical schools (except for ~13 or so) now download them from AMCAS when they want to. As far as I know, they won’t download them until they’ve received your secondary.</p>
<p>Oh, and curmudgeon: Duke’s secondary is brutal. Nothing expected based on last year’s, but actually reading the questions on my screen is a little jarring. Joy.</p>
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<p>Sure, schools won’t look at your app before it’s complete, but how is turning in secondaries before all your LORs are in unprofessional? I’ve never heard that before.</p>
<p>Yea, I don’t really understand the reasoning behind that. It’s perfectly fine to turn your secondaries in before you turn in your LOR’s. It’s often impossible to turn everything in together anyway because your secondaries are coming from you while your LOR’s are coming from your school’s premed committee or Interfolio or something.</p>
<p>keep in mind that some schools take a while to process your secondary. so if you turn in your secondary the day your letters are posted to AMCAS there might still be a delay while they process your secondary. </p>
<p>also it’s not a good idea to let a secondary drag on too long because you should focus your attention on the new secondaries. i know it’s easier to keep “refining” your old one than to start a new one but you’ve gotta call it at some point.</p>
<p>DD is slogging through a bundle of secondaries since her verification. Exciting and tedious both.</p>
<p>My D was under the impression that a relatively small percentage of schools notify you to send in secondaries after you apply. Apparently this isn’t the case since she got applications from all of them. Do you recommend applying to all of them?</p>
<p>As many as she’s physically capable of writing this summer, yes.</p>
<p>Why are the students themselves not more involved in these discussions?</p>
<p>@ steeler, shades, and NCG, etc. - you are all quite right and I am wrong - not sure what I was thinking. Of course you can’t send in LORs physically with the secondary. Complete brain fart on my part. Sorry.</p>
<p>A lot of students wouldn’t be caught dead on any of these sites.</p>
<p>I just read through this entire thread. Wow! Good luck to the offspring of everyone on here :). I’ll be going through this process two years down the line, and already getting anxious about it…</p>
<p>somemom, your post about residency got me wondering about my residency situation. I grew up/went to high school in CA, where my family is now. I attend college in RI, but I’m a CA driver and voter. If my dad continues to live in CA, but my mom (with whom I live when home from college) moves to a third state before I apply to med school, what is my state of residency?</p>
<p>You need to look at the CA residency rules, each state is differenth. My DD could have chosen to remain a CA resident and I think we would have just needed her to be not our income tax dependent.</p>
<p>In her case, she changed to our new state with the move, but would not have spent 12 months straight here so had to be our dependent. It is complex. You need to decide in which state you want to be a resident and see if you can meet their rules, you can be a state resident and NOT be one for tuition, so download the forms and check it out 12 months BEFORE you APPLY, as the schools are verifying NOW at application.</p>
<p>Exciting, today Dd received her first SCREENED secondary 
Some one at least thinks she is minimally worthy!</p>
<p>A lot of students also go to the Student Doctor Network website, which has a surprisingly low parent count relative to the number of students. SDN’s forums are heavily dedicated to the sharing of neuroticism/information among pre-meds, medical students, etc. While I enjoy the site, I am very glad that I never found it before I was accepted to medical school. It would have driven me crazy with anxiety.</p>
<p>I read SDN, but avoid posting much as it feels almost voyeuristic to be reading all the student posts. In posting I would feel almost like a lame parent at a teen slumber party, trying to join in the game- too many behind the back eye rolls going on!</p>
<p>I spend waaaaay too much time looking at SDN. But Thank God, I’ve forgotten my D’s password. For the first time I had the over-whelming urge to post the other day (Under her name. Yeah. Not my best plan.) and used up her 5 tries attempting to guess and then the sneaky weasels sent a message to her i-phone :eek:. She grounded me within 2 minutes. 
(Edit: I’m sure I had something im-po-tant to say ;))</p>
<p>The Mayo thread (double screened LOR requests), Chicago (near instantaneous rejections) and the Pitt thread (interview invites) are the home of the greatest # of neurotics right now it seems. </p>
<p>D is taking a break from Appland and going into some Harry Potter coven/cauldron thing with her college roomie in Nashville for a few days. She has 4 secondaries stacked up and 1 she’ll probably get today. </p>
<p>She’s complete at over half her schools so a break is good idea. A small break.</p>
<p>I knew little of my kid’s course choices as an undergrad except to hear anecdotes when she took an interesting class. I knew less of her med school application process short of letting her vent as she was getting it all done. My part in this was moral support - I occasionally asked if she was keeping track of deadlines and forwarded any mail that came to the house for her. She was lucky and had a great relationship with her pre-med advisor who did well by her. The mcat seemed to cause her more stress than anything. The anticipatory stress for that kind of test is not fun - it seems to be that way for many. </p>
<p>Rather than drive her nuts with the typical parent questions I read posts on SDN to get a sense of the ebb and flow of interview invitations, acceptances and wait-list activity. As an acceptance or two came in for her I read about housing and lifestyle issues at those schools. She was in the midst of writing a thesis and was not able to attend second look weekends so THAT information was useful to her. My D has rolled her eyes at me about the boards for years but when I read a quirky post about the application process for one medical school in particular and confirmed it with a poster here at CC (thank you!), I passed the info on to her. We both believe that the little piece of information initially picked up on a bulletin board played some part in her acceptance. She is no longer snarky when she comes up from behind me and sees that I am on CC. ;)</p>
<p>No, Curmie, No, never post on your kids name! Bad Curm!</p>
<p>I do admit that my graduate level DD had no internet at house and often would call and have me login to her accounts and post messages, answer emails, etc, but God forbid I should have a typo!!</p>
<p>My son doesn’t do the whole forum thing, but he had no problem with me having an account. I would let him know if there was something worthwhile that he needed to know about any of his schools. I did post a couple of times for really stupid things; one was whether the acceptance letter came in a regular envelope or a larger packet! These things are important when you are stalking the mailman ;-)</p>