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:
- What makes you distinct/unique compared to other applicants?
- How will you bring diversity to our program?
- Why do you want to attend our school?
- Describe a personal challenge that you faced and how you overcame that challenge.
- What do you consider the role of a health professional to be in a community?
- Which personal accomplishment are you most proud of and why?
- What has been your most humbling experience and how will that experience affect your interactions with your peers and patients?
- 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:
- Focus your energy on the schools that you are most interested in attending first.
- 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.)
- 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.)
- 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!):
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