Pre-Health Prep Series: Secondary Applications

It's almost August and some of you have already submitted your applications to professional programs. Great job! Now the wait for secondary applications begins!

In the meantime, you can be preparing for secondaries by developing set answers for the most common types of questions that are asked during secondaries (or perhaps later during interviews). Even if you don't take the time to write out your responses to things you haven't been asked yet, it can be good to reflect on your experiences and can save you a lot of time if you know what to expect.

Here are a few common types of secondary application essay prompts that you might see:

1. What makes you distinct/unique compared to other applicants?
2. How will you bring diversity to our program?
3. Why do you want to attend our school?
4. Describe a personal challenge that you faced and how you overcame that challenge.
5. What do you consider the role of a health professional to be in a community?
6. Which personal accomplishment are you most proud of and why?
7. What has been your most humbling experience and how will that experience affect your interactions with your peers and patients?
8. Where do you see your future health career (academic, research, public health, primary care, business/law, etc.) and why?

As secondary applications come in, you will want to strike a balance between a timely response and a high-quality response. You never want to rush your responses and make silly mistakes like having the name of the wrong school in an essay or sending something with grammatical errors. Those kinds of things can really hurt your chances of getting an interview. You need to put in the time to make sure that things are professional and of sound quality. However, you don't want to take too much time because that can also be perceived as unprofessional and demonstrate a lack of interest. In general, 3-4 days is about how much time you should spend preparing and submitting each of your secondaries. Remember that the Pre-Health Pathways office is willing to help you review your responses and offer feedback if needed!

There are several different approaches to dealing with secondaries as you start to receive them. The Princeton Review recommends using one of the four strategies that follow:

1. Focus your energy on the schools that you are most interested in attending first.
2. Hold off on sending secondaries to the more competitive schools until you've sent out a few to the less competitive ones. (For some students, their last secondaries will be stronger than the first few that they send back.)
3. Reply first to schools whose secondaries ask questions to which you can easily give solid answers. (This allows you to work your way up to more difficult secondaries.)
4. Practice writing secondary responses/essays before you receive your first secondaries. This allows you to send out well-written and personalized responses to your top choices first.

Whichever approach you choose, there are a few things for you to keep in mind as you move forward:

• Do your research! Look up the mission/vision statements for the programs that send you secondaries. Maybe even call the school or connect with some of their current students to learn more about the program. You want to know more about your audience as you formulate your responses/essays and you want to showcase your fit for each program. Knowing about the school's values can help you answer the "why us?" questions and can help you demonstrate to the admissions committees how you are compatible with what they are looking for in applicants for their program. You can also tailor your responses to questions like "what makes you unique" or "how would you bring diversity to us" by having a better understanding of the program.
• Put your responses in a separate document. Copy + paste your secondary questions/prompts into a word processor and work on your responses/essays there. This allows you to make edits without worrying about losing material in the application portal or accidentally submitting before you were finished with your work. When you are ready to copy/paste back into the application portal, be sure that you don't have any weird formatting or special characters that don't properly carry over before you submit.
• Give the admissions committees new information/context. Remember that with these kinds of essays, you don't want to rehash your personal statement. The admissions committee already read that and thought it was compelling enough (alongside other parts of your application) to request a secondary from you. Even if you feel like you addressed whatever they are asking you for in your personal essay, resist the urge to copy + paste anything from your primary! You want to provide them with new information or with a new way of looking at some other experience that you've already talked a little bit about in other parts of your primary application.
  
• Answer the questions you were asked and stay on-topic. Always make sure that you are following the prompt for essays and/or appropriately answering the questions that were asked as part of your secondaries. Secondary applications are much more specific than primaries and admissions committees want to understand your goals, experiences, and personal views in greater depth. They are also looking to see if you are a good fit for their program (and whether their program is a good fit for what you want out of your career). Additionally, they are looking to see how well your secondaries compliment things that you talked about in your primary application. Finally, committees want to know that you can stay on-topic and follow directions, so be sure to double-check all of your materials before sending in your secondaries!
• Double/triple check everything.While you don't want to take too long with returning your secondaries, you do want to be intentional about your use of language and word choice. You are only given a limited amount of character space for your responses/essays, so every word counts! Make sure that you are staying within the character limit and not trying to squeeze in extras that have less impact, like flowery language or cliches. You also don't want to have any typos, grammatical errors, or big whoopsies, like addressing the wrong program. If you have the time, it is good to put a secondary that you feel is complete away for 24 hours, then reviewing it with fresh eyes to look for any mistakes before you submit. It is also good to have others look over your responses to try to spot any of these kinds of errors prior to submission.

Here are a few additional resources for getting through the secondary application process. (I may have drawn from them while writing this post!):

• Secondary Application Practical Advice
• Medical School Secondary Essays: The Complete Guide (Examples Included)
• 5 Tips for Medical School Secondary Applications

Advice from an Alumnus: Meet Janelle Strampe Fried!

SD Mines has a reputation for excellence that reverberates through our students long after they leave campus with their degrees in hand. Today, we are featuring on of our alumni, Janelle Strampe Fried, who earned her B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2014, then stayed to finish her M.S. in Biomedical Engineering and graduated in 2015. She is currently in medical school at the University of Washington School of Medicine and is taking some time off between her 4th and 5th years of the program and is here in Rapid City. We caught up with Janelle to ask her about her time at SD Mines and how it helped to prepare her for a career in medicine.

Hey, Janelle! Wow, two degrees in engineering! How are you using those skills these days?
[At the moment,] I’m using my mathematical skills to help renovate my in-laws kitchen. I joke that an engineering degree is very good for medical school but very good for life in general, especially during DIY projects. 

What made you decide to take a year off?
I am taking a year off because I decided to start my family and was encouraged by my school’s dean of students to take time off with my daughter before residency started. Also, it’s very difficult to fly all over the country and interview during your third trimester, so logistically it was easier to take a longer maternity leave. 

What kinds of shadowing did you do to get a better feel for medicine before applying to medical school? What did you learn from those experiences? 
I mostly worked with Dr. Clark Duchene at Black Hills Orthopedic & Spine Center. It was wonderful to shadow him in the outpatient clinic and many times in the operating room. [It was] also [great] being exposed to anesthesiology. This was one of my first experiences in the clinical world and I learned how the healthcare team works together to care for the patient. I also learned about several different opportunities in the medical field and was exposed to other healthcare professions like PA, nursing, physical therapy, etc. While every person was important to the team, I was able to determine that becoming a physician was the right path for me and my future goals for my career. 

Did you do any research as an undergraduate? If so, what kind and what did you learn from those experiences? Did you do any research afterward?
I worked with Dr. Sinden through the biomedical engineering department during my undergraduate degree which led to my graduate work in the same lab working on triplet repeat expansion diseases. My thesis work was focused around Friedreich’s Ataxia, specifically. While this experience was very valuable, I decided that clinical work was more of my personality rather than conducting bench research.

What kinds of volunteering did you do during your undergraduate?
During my time in Rapid City, I was involved with several different opportunities, but my favorites were weekly tutoring sessions at the YMCA North Teen Center and being a volleyball coach for Black Hills Juniors Volleyball Club. Also, during my undergraduate, I really enjoyed volunteering with Junior Achievement in Houston one summer when I was doing a summer internship for LyondellBasell.

How did you prepare for the MCAT or other entrance exam?
I worked through an MCAT prep book that I received from an upperclassman who had been accepted to medical school the year prior. I would recommend taking a class to really prepare for the MCAT. Additionally, I would focus on techniques to become the best standardized test taker you can be because once you get into medical school you will take several board exams and if you can learn better study techniques from the beginning, it will be one way to start medical school off right. 

What do you do when you aren’t studying?
Spending time with my husband, Lucas, and daughter, Adeline. I enjoy hiking, fishing, and all activities outdoors. Additionally, I enjoy DIY projects and define myself as an amateur woodworker. 

What techniques do you use to manage your time and stress levels?
As I played volleyball and basketball at School of Mines, exercising and staying active really helped with stress levels and I try to continue this when I can. I took a mindfulness class my second year of medical school, which taught several techniques to help with stress management, including yoga and deep breathing. For time management, I love lists and make lists daily, weekly, and monthly making sure I finish what I need to, when I need to. 

What advice do you have for pre-health students who are struggling?
Always remember what you are passionate about and put all your heart and mind towards it. Don’t assume anything and nothing replaces hard work. Enjoy the journey. As I look back on my collegiate career, an early influence on my success was my thermodynamics professor at School of Mines who told me “Believe that you have what it takes to be great.” To me, this is something that is crucial to be successful in any area of your life and has stuck with me for several years…this idea of simply believing you have what it takes. Believing in yourself. I know you’ve all heard this over and over, but to me it is just that simple. Continue. Lastly, learn to love what you do and then do what you truly love.

Pre-Health Prep Series: Writing Personal Essays

It's the time of year when students are sending in their personal essays for professional programs. They've been writing and revising and revising and writing some more. At the Pre-Health Pathways office, we have lots of great resources to help students begin and move through the process of preparing a personal statement for their applications. During the regular semesters, we host a Personal Essays Workshop to help students get started with reflecting on their experiences and drafting their first essays. There are lots of great tips, resources, and collections of advice for helping students in this area, but today we are going to talk about the four major areas that every good personal essay should address.

The first area is MOTIVATION. This is a major component of the essay as it answers the big "why?" question for admissions committees. You want the committee to understand, specifically, why you want a career in health care. And don't you dare leave it at "I want to help people". There are lots of jobs where you can "help people", so don't be generic! Give some context about what got you interested in health care. Did a person inspire you? Was there an event in your life that made you want to be a doctor/PT/dentist/etc.? Tell the committee about what drives you to continue pursing that career when things get hard. You can showcase your resilience, reliability, dependability, and service orientation by discussing your motivation. While you can talk about motivation throughout your essay, it is a great place to start and a nice thing to use for "closing the loop" on your narrative, so we recommend writing about motivation in your first paragraph and then bringing it back up in the final paragraph of your essay.

The second area to address is FIT. When we talk about fit, we are talking about how your experiences relate to the profession (i.e. how the program is a good fit for you) and about how you are going to contribute uniquely to a student cohort and eventually as a professional (i.e. how you are a good fit for the program). You want to talk about why you would make a good professional and how you would enrich a program as a student with a unique perspective due to your background, pre-health training, culture, or other life experiences. This is a good place to showcase your diversity as a member of an underrepresented group, as a person with a non-traditional education pathway, as someone who has experienced a long struggle with a health condition, as a person from a small town, as someone who has traveled to be part of humanitarian efforts, etc. Diversity can be defined in a lot of different ways, so think about how you will bring a unique perspective to class discussions and talk about it. The idea here is to persuade the committee that you would be a great person to interview for their program because the profession is a good fit for your goals and you are a good fit for any program. You can also talk about fit to address how you've changed for the better over time. How you've grown. The professional distance that you've traveled to bring you to this moment. By talking about fit, you can demonstrate things like your service orientation, your cultural competence, your social and teamwork skills, your ethical responsibility, your resilience and adaptability, and/or your capacity for improvement. Talking about fit works well as a second paragraph as transitioning from motivation to fit often flows nicely. It is also something that you can reiterate in a conclusive paragraph with just a couple of summary sentences.


You should also address CAPACITY. Capacity refers to how well your training, skills, attributes, and other competencies align with the expectations of the profession. A good place to start thinking about your capacity is to review the kinds of competencies that your profession expects of pre-health applicants and then to self-assess how capable you are in each of those areas. You want to talk about the qualifications that you have right now and how those have prepared you to thrive in a professional program. Talk about the skills that you have developed from your time as a student and from your health care experiences so far. Talk about how you have developed things that will help you to succeed in a program, such as better study habits, ways of balancing school, work, and personal obligations, or good bedside manner. Discuss your professional distance traveled, like you did with fit, but this time focus on the skills that helped you to grow and how you are continuing to grow. This section can help you to show the committee that you are reliable, that you are responsible, that you have the ability to adapt and improve, and that you have a good foundation from which to build your career in the profession. Moving from a discussion of fit to a discussion of capacity can be done naturally in writing, so we suggest talking about capacity in a third or fourth paragraph in your essay. That being said, sometimes you can talk about both fit and capacity simultaneously within your narrative, so if that works for you, feel free to intermingle the two within the body of your essay. Do remember to refer back to capacity in the conclusive paragraph with a sentence or two summarizing what makes you qualified to be applying.

Finally, the last thing you should talk about is your VISION. Think about what impact you want to have on your profession. Where do you see yourself when you finish your program and are out in the workforce? How do you envision working with your patients, colleagues, or maybe even students someday? What kinds of things do you wan tot achieve in your career? You don't want to spend a ton of character-space addressing things you haven't done yet, but you do want to talk a little bit about these things to show the committee that you've thought about it. This can also reinforce your motivation and fit as you've previously described them. While you could make this a full paragraph, you could also just sprinkle some of this into the body or just use it in the conclusive paragraph to help you with wrapping up your narrative.

If you are having trouble getting started with writing your personal essay, you could try reflecting on these four areas and writing down a few things under each. You want to address those four areas within a narrative that is interesting to read, so you can also think about structuring your essay by first providing context (talking about motivation works well here), then presenting an action, change, or insight (here's where you can talk about fit and capacity), and then discussing the outcome and how it relates to the context from the beginning (close the loop with vision and motivation). You can use this suggested order to help you lay out the structure of your narrative, but don't feel like you are tied to that format. You want your writing to feel authentic just as much as you want it to feel professional.

After you've written a draft of your essay, you'll want to do some serious editing. Put it away for 24 hours, then come back to it with fresh eyes and see what mistakes you made, what doesn't make sense, and what you could do to make it more precise. Sometimes, reading the essay out loud to yourself can help you identify what you actually wrote as compared to what you intended to say. (Our brains are notorious for autocorrecting when we read things silently, so this is a great way to catch silly little mistakes!) Then revise and send your essay out to others to help you check for grammatical errors, flow, and content. Then revise some more...and then even more revising. Make sure that your essay is going to make the best first impression possible with those on the admissions committees who will be reading it.

Remember that the Pre-Health Pathways office is open all summer and we are happy to help you get started on your essay and work on edits before you submit. Your personal essay, combined with your interview, can account for as much as 60% of your applicant score for some programs, so be sure that you are submitting your very best work! For those of you planning to apply next year, it's never too early to start working on your essay. ;)