<p>Has anyone had experience with or know of anyone who studied abroad any part of the summer after their junior year? </p>
<p>Is it doable? Can you keep up with the secondary applications from another country or is it just acceptance suicide to try doing both?</p>
<p>Is there a "quiet period" after sending your AMCAS application until the storm of secondaries starts?</p>
<p>The semester that I was studying abroad, I knew two people a year older than me who were doing secondaries while studying abroad with me. They arranged to do interviews after they got home at the beginning of December. Both were accepted into medical school that year. So it’s definitely do-able. I’m not sure I’d want to for various reasons. For one thing, secondaries take up a ton of time, and it would be a shame to miss out on so many opportunities abroad because you’re spending time doing secondaries. For another thing, you’re depending on having a reliable internet connection in order to submit your secondaries. And you might have to mail a secondary from another country which can be both expensive and risky depending what country you’re in (although the majority of my secondaries were submitted electronically, and I suspect that more and more secondaries switch to electronic submission each year). So there are some definite problems, but it is manageable if you absolutely have to.</p>
<p>In my experience, the quiet period came between when I submitted my secondaries and when I started interviews. The secondaries started pretty much as soon as the AMCAS was processed (and at least one came before it was processed).</p>
<p>Thanks Ginnyvere! D is a science/foreign language double major and abroad right now for a short self-arranged medically related experience. She is enjoying it so much she asked, “Do you think there would be any way I could come back next summer and do research?” I told her we’d check into it, but it sounds like it wouldn’t be the best idea (which is what I was thinking). Four years of undergrad is just not enough time to get in all the classes and experiences she wants to tackle!</p>
<p>This is what I’ll be doing this summer. There is a little break in between submitting the primary and receiving secondaries, but it’s true, secondaries take up time and when you’re abroad, the last thing you want is to be losing time to extra stuff.</p>
<p>Things that will help:
<p>Only doing one summer session abroad probably wouldn’t be that bad. If you had your AMCAS ready before you went. One summer session is, what, four weeks? Five weeks? Assuming that you left mid-May, you’d have two weeks before you could even submit your primary, and if you held off submitting it for a week or so after the opening date (a week probably wont make a difference in med school admissions because you’ll still be in the first “group” to be looked at by medical schools), it would be a little time before your AMCAS got processed, and then there will be a slight down time between your AMCAS being processed and at least some of the secondaries (like I said, some will be e-mailed immediately after the primary is processed, and even fewer immediately after the primary is submitted). And by that point, your daughter would be getting ready to leave anyway.</p>
<p>But I would think that it wouldn’t be a good idea to spend the entire summer abroad. And it would essentially be a wasted abroad experience if she didn’t have her primary done before she left. So it would be close, and difficult. I’m still not sure I’d do it, but I’m fairly certain that it could be done without it ruining either her chances for getting into medical school or her experience abroad.</p>