<p>My daughter originally had a similar plan to the one eadad described, but she has reconsidered and is planning to go more along the lines of BDM. Hopefully BDM meant 2 hours and not 12!</p>
<p>Saw a list on SDN showing which school screen secondaries and I am heartened to see how many secondaries DD has received that were screened. Of course she has at least 15 going right now with a schedule as to which to submit every 2 days for the next two weeks!</p>
<p>VATech Car, the new school, has an intense evaluation system for profs to log on and talk about you. I don’t know how any one is going to get their profs to do this over the summer, most profs seem unavailable. DD cannot even seem to get back the TX evals that were given to the profs last May. :(</p>
<p>
Yup. Thirteen would have just been tooooooo dang many. ;)</p>
<p>Sleep in the night before the night before the MCAT, you won’t be sleeping as well the night before.</p>
<p>Interviews starting to come in. Feels nice to finally hear news on that front.</p>
<p>General question: for schools that are non-rolling, would it be better to schedule these interviews for later in the cycle as I’d have more interview experience?</p>
<p>Steeler: Interview timing is definitely tricky. The general rule is that you want to put your top choices early-but-not-quite-first – this is especially true if they’re rolling, but it’s true overall. Your other-choices should go second.</p>
<p>The underlying philosophy is that if you get a top-choice acceptance early (e.g. Hopkins, Baylor, WUSTL, and others which roll) you want to be able to cancel the other interviews. Since you probably wouldn’t want to cancel Penn or Stanford anyway, may as well put those early to buy you time to cancel the others.</p>
<p>Feel free to PM if you want more detailed advice.</p>
<p>Steeler - about how long did it take to start getting interview requests after sending in secondaries?<br>
DS is about 2-3 wks behind your kid and cur’s dtr. He has sent in about 8 secondaries the past 1-2 wks but hasn’t gotten any interviews yet. He is isn’t nervous about it, but mom is getting there.</p>
<p>DDs AMCAS was submitted around the 20s of June and verified around July 9/10.</p>
<p>She did some secondaries as soon as she submitted, the one she snail mailed on July 1 resulted in her interview offer last week. First interview invite. Probably first app completed too.</p>
<p>I think 2-3 weeks would be a little soon to be worried. I’ve lost all track of timing but I think her invites were all at schools she’s been complete at for longer than that (or at least that long). </p>
<p>In other news- interview one is done and she enjoyed it. I hope that means something positive. 
Interview 2 on Friday.</p>
<p>I got interview offers over a very long period of time (in fact, my last three were 2-3 months after I submitted my secondaries).</p>
<p>This was a few years ago, but I submitted my primary on June 5th and had 23 secondaries done by July 20th. My first interview invite came on I think August 1st, they continued to come in for a little while, but I got some invites as late as February.</p>
<p>Sometimes the process is infuriatingly slow, but some schools move relatively quick.</p>
<p>Just to confirm: I’m pretty sure I submitted my Los Angeles application in mid-July but didn’t receive an invitation to interview until mid-October, approximately a three month wait. I know schools like San Diego didn’t want to interview me until (I think) January-ish.</p>
<p>Jeez, bdm. You were cooking. Impressive. Mine has done 17 (really only 14 as 3 of her Texas schools didn’t have secondaries), with 4 to do, and still 2 yet to be received.</p>
<p>Yeah, my “23” were really only 19, I think.</p>
<p>sheesh 10+ done, 15+ on the desk, several going in this week. Kansas is a killer, but it was screened for OOS so worth the investment, plus with nearly a dozen questions there ought to be nothing left unasked that she cannot simply recycle the KS answers to apply to other secondaries.</p>
<p>TX is not yet verified, so 4 more coming there, plus some still screening or not releasing them until later. This is what really stinks about having a lower than ideal MCAT, the need to apply to so many schools and go crazy with secondaries.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>How many are you talking about here? 25? 30? or even more?</p>
<p>Compared to college applications, how much additional work is needed for medical school applications? 10X?</p>
<p>
Probably incomparable, since interviewing is part of the process. That includes travel, expense, taking time off of school, etc. If you exclude interviews, I’d say it’s probably about 5x primary-compared-to-common app and 10x secondary-compared-to-supplement.</p>
<p>Quick MCAT question … does anyone know if you are allowed to bring your own pens/pencils to the test?</p>
<p>You should bring some just in case, but most testing centers supply them and will ask you to leave them in a safe place.</p>
<p>Ok, well mom here will stop worrying. DS sent his AMCAS towards end of June and was verified on July 10th. He has completed 16 secondaries already and is working on 2 more right now. He still has to hear back from a couple more schools. He has been trying to get at least 1 secondary every 1-2 days. So far he has been doing pretty well at keeping to that schedule. It has been helpful that he can recycle answers. He spends each evening working on them. I am been amazed at how much “work” they are even if some of them are simple. A couple of essays, 250 words each, doesn’t sound like much, but they do take time to think about and compose concisely.</p>