<p>kristin, Your amcas should be verified soon.</p>
<p>For DS: transcripts sent in very early (beginning of june), amcas primary sent 7/8 to 7/10 (can not remember exactly, but likely not earlier than yours). verified some time last week.</p>
<p>His tmdsas is still pending though (likely still need to wait 1 - 2 weeks from now.)</p>
<p>I kinda figure…AMCAS verification timeline is outta my control. It would be nice to know, but really, it’s going to be verified as soon as it’s verified. In the meantime, I’m going to start working on secondaries and make sure all my letters of recommendation are in order, so that when I’m verified it won’t take much longer to have a completed application. At my school, recommenders send letters to the pre-med committee. Committee interviews applicants, writes composite letter, then staples it to a stack of other letters to be transmitted as one package to the schools. I figure…having that package ready and waiting to be sent would be a good idea. All recommendation letters save for one have been received, so “all” I have to do now (before I can really move on) is make sure that last one gets there and set up my interview with the committee!</p>
<p>
I believe the “committee packet” is transmitted electronically, e.g., by virtual eval, rather than by snail mail. I heard how much you pay to the premed committee/your own school depends on how many schools you apply to. (This fee is peanut though.) I do not know whether ALL of these medical schools have means to accept the committee packet transmitted by your school electronically. I do not know how it works. Since the undergraduate college is each school’s major “milk cow”, undergraduate admission office has much more financial resources. In comparison, I think the admission office for a professional school is much smaller, and may not be as well equipped as the undergraduate admission office.</p>
<p>Even for DS’s AMCAS primary, I think he paid about $600. Much more is expected when he submits his secondaries. This is the price to pay for applying to many schools (so that you can sleep better.) Why are all perspective medical school students “punished” financially and psychologically? It may be a part of the “training” (e.g., to screen out those who are not very committed), reasonable or not.</p>
<p>kristin, some Committees take their time in writing the Letter, especially if in your school there are a lot of premeds. By June 11, the Committee at my school had everything they needed (I interviewed with them in April!); however, they started sending letters a couple of weeks ago and I am still waiting for mine. Make sure that they have everything they need ASAP, so they won’t have any excuses.</p>
<p>Thanks for the tip, MyOpinion. Mine doesn’t start interviewing until mid-August, so hopefully I’ll be among the first few interviewed!</p>
<p>D’s UG process was different. She had committee interview during spring semester. Committee has send everything including LOR’s to AMCAS. D. just filled primary and I believe, she paid under $300, but it might depend on number of schools. She applied to 7. Secondary fees are about $85 each. One more to go, hopefully today.<br>
The best wishes, Kristin and everybody else.</p>
<p>BIG DAY–VERIFIED!</p>
<p>Wooohoooo. Only bummer is that my AMCAS GPA was slightly lower than the ones from my school–sGPA=3.74, cGPA=3.78, whereas with my school’s calculations each was approximately .6 point higher. Using the collective wisdom of my sage CC pals, would it be worthwhile to debate my GPAs assuming I find some discrepancies when I check them over? (ie, they didn’t count this class toward BCPM when it’s really a BCPM class, etc)</p>
<p>More bluntly, is there a big difference between a 3.74 and a 3.81, and a 3.78 and a 3.84? If yes, I’ll scrutinize my AMCAS to see if there were any mistakes; if not, then I’ll likely just let it be and wait patiently for my official secondaries!</p>
<p>Statistically, there is not a big difference, but I gotta believe that there is a big difference psychologically. Kinda like the difference between a 680/690 on the SAT and a 700+. That ‘7’ just looks a whole lot better even though CB will agree that there is absolutely zero statistical difference between the two candidates.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is a big difference, but certainly check to make sure there is no actual keying error</p>
<p>Yep, I’ve gone through it twice, and it seems that the error was mine. I’d forgotten that my school does not include grades from other schools in GPA calculations, whereas AMCAS certainly does. A 4h B+ in Calc II from SLU during high school and a 3h B from a cc for freshman composition are the culprits of the lower AMCAS GPA. Bummer, but whatcha gonna do? Hopefully it won’t make too much of a difference!</p>
<p>Congrats for having been verified.
Just a dumb question: How can you tell on your AMCAS page that you have been verified? We, the parents, were told he had been verified but for two times we logged into his AMCAS site (he gave us the password, etc., and asked us to proof-read his course listing at that time), we did not know where to look in order to tell whether it is verified. So, we do not know his AMCAS gpa either; we only know the one from his school. (I think his school treats A- as 3.67, B+ as 3.33, etc.)</p>
<p>We also do not know where to look in order to tell his TMDSAS is verified (somehow texas kids use the term “transmitted” instead of just “verified” on sdn.)</p>
<p>I hope that, on the first page after you log into one of these sites, there is the word “verified” or “transmitted” shown somewhere.</p>
<p>Hey MCAT2,</p>
<p>Not a dumb question–took me awhile to figure that out too. Once you log in, on the left side it says “Applicant Info” with name, AAMC ID, and Status. Once AMCAS is submitted, the status is very similar to “AMCAS Submitted, awaiting verification” (except the word isn’t verification–can’t recall exactly what it is though). This is the status which appears after you see “AMCAS Submitted, awaiting transcripts.” Once you’ve been verified, the status is updated to say “Status: AMCAS Processing is complete.”</p>
<p>If you want to know what his AMCAS GPA is, what you need to do is click on print application (over at the right). A new window/tab will pop up (I don’t think it’s considered a popup though, my blocker didn’t mind it) with a PDF version of his application. Chances are, all this GPA info will be on page 4-6, with course information just preceeding it. You can save this PDF too, as well as print it. I’ve had remarkable trouble generating the PDF on a Mac, but absolutely none when using a PC. I haven’t been able to find AMCAS GPA information anywhere besides the PDF version of the application. </p>
<p>Hope this helps!</p>
<p>kristin, Thanks. It helps.</p>
<p>The GPA is shown on page 6 of the generated pdf file. It appears AMCAS categorizes many of his classes as BCPM classes: 80 BCPM credits, which are more than his AO credits (68 credits). It is still not easy to tell exactly which courses are regarded as BCPM courses and which are AO ones by AMCAS. His overall GPA and sGPA (the difference between these two is 0.02) seem to be unchanged after AMCAS verification.</p>
<p>The ones that are BCPM are the ones that he classified as BCPM, as long as AMCAS agreed. If you look at the grid with his courses/grades etc in it, a column or two to the left of course name is the category. The courses classified as, you guessed it, bio/chem/physics/math count toward BCPM. All other classes count toward, you guessed it, AO. Combining them for the totals gives you, you guessed it, total GPA.</p>
<p>The AMCAS rule book tells you how to classify various classes that might not exactly fall into BCPM (like what to do with biochem (bio) and what to do with genetics (bio) etc).</p>
<p>Great, kristin. Now go camp out on the committee’s lawn till you are completely complete.</p>
<p>Thanks cur, I will do my best. My committee’s policy is to wait to schedule you for an interview until all LORs are received. All but 1 of mine (I have 8, which personally I think is probably too many but I honestly felt bad turning down offers to write on my behalf, thus I have more than twice the recommended number…lol) have been received and processed, and the remaining writer is aware that his is the last to come in (though he was out of the country for a few weeks, so his lateness is understandable). Plus, my committee won’t even start interviewing regular decision applicants until school starts (in 10 days) so hopefully I’m not far behind. </p>
<p>Luckily for me, the head of the committee is “on my side,” and he’s in charge of scheduling. Hopefully he’ll give me a little bit of a nudge to the earlier side of things 
But I sure do have a lot of secondaries to work on between now and being completely complete! Should be an eventful weekend. Wish me luck.</p>
<p>Congrats Kristin and best luck with the rest of process!</p>
<p>This has nothing (well almost nothing) to do with D’s progress (or lack thereof) in the application process. </p>
<p>She’s been verified, Yeah! And passed her criminal background check. Yeah again!</p>
<p>But even better, she was called to interview today for a high school teaching position (chem and physics–thank you President Obama. The new bill has allow the local school district to hire 100 additional teachers, one of which will hopefully be D. The downside–classes start Monday and she will no time to prepare anything since she’s competing in a triathlon all day Sunday). The job will provide both benies (yeah!) and a regular salary to pay those med school application fees.</p>
<p>All right guys, time for some strategy.</p>
<p>I ended up applying to 13 schools: Boston, Creighton, Drexel, Duke, Gerogetown, Harvard, Loyola, Mayo, Mizzou, Northwestern, SLU, Tufts, and UVA. Mizzou’s my top choice and statistically my best bet as a MO resident. </p>
<p>I’ve received 4 secondaries and the “send me money” email from Mayo. The secondaries are for Boston, Duke, SLU, and UVA. Additionally, I have tortured myself on SDN (again!) to find the essay prompts for my schools with secondaries requiring essays (I believe Tufts and Harvard don’t, as well as another one that I can’t remember). </p>
<p>I haven’t started my secondaries yet but plan to devote this entire weekend to them–I typically write well and quick when I get on a roll, so presumably I will have a nice dent in my essays and/or secondaries come next week. I know the goal is typically “get them out ASAP but don’t rush through them–high quality is important” for secondaries.</p>
<p>So…is there any strategy to tackling these things? Should it be “first come first completed”? Focus first on the schools I really like, or focus later on those because then I’ll have more experience writing? Start with the ones that have the most comprehensive essays, and then adapt? Throw darts? </p>
<p>Perhaps there isn’t a strategy and I’m overthinking it–would be better to just START WRITING. But if there is some strategy here, I’d like to know it! (For what it’s worth, I anticipate my committee interview will occur within the next 10 days or so, and the letter will be written shortly thereafter, with the dossier of committee letter + LORs to leave the office shortly thereafter–so perhaps I have some time, if my file won’t be reviewed until it’s complete with LORs)</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>Wait on Duke. They don’t care. Do the others FIFO. (First in , first out.) If you want a tiebreaker or need to triage , do rolling before non-rolling.</p>