Time is of the Application’s Essence
Trevor is the Founder of Premedicine.org and the proud advisor to the Dr. Bernard Harris Premedical Society at Texas Tech University
It seems that every year, I advise a slew of students who, for whatever reason, just had their timing completely off when it came to applying for medical school. They took the MCAT too late, or waited until they saw their score before they started the application process, or just flat out waited until the deadline. The trouble with these conversations was and is, is that they’re always done after the person has realized he/she did not get accepted. Applying to medical school and the requisite time line for success varies depending on what each applicant’s circumstances are. Even though premedical students sometimes ask the same questions, they are all vastly different in their overall situation.
My point is that time, as you physics folks should know, is a relative thing. However, there are a few major things that all premedical students would be aware of when deciding when the best time is to apply:
- Where you are in your coursework when the application period begins
- When you are taking the MCAT
- When the application period opens
- Have a general understanding of the Texas medical admissions business
Let’s go through each element in detail:
WHERE YOU ARE IN YOUR COURSEWORK
Make sure that your graduation and/or prerequisite courses will be completed 1 year out from the time you interview.
All applicants should understand 2 major points here. 1.) You DO NOT have to have all of your medical school prerequisites completed by the time you apply, but rather by the time you would matriculate into a medical school. It is in your best interest to have as many of them done as possible at the time of application, but don’t worry if you don’t have them all finished up. This point leads me directly into my second: 2.) It is important that you examine your anticipated graduation date and be very honest with yourself about when you’re likely to be done. Most people apply to medical school when they have approximately 1 year’s worth of coursework remaining. In other words, they hope to be interviewing as they are starting their senior year of undergraduate courses. This is very important because any miscalculation on your part will likely lead to a revocation of your medical school acceptance, if you cannot complete the coursework, by the time you would have started medical school.
All Texas medical schools offer deferments, however, they are usually only offered on a case by case basis and only for unforeseen exceptional circumstances that have surfaced since you interviewed. So, in other words, don’t gamble on pushing the limits here.
WHEN YOU ARE TAKING THE MCAT
Maximize your MCAT prep time, while balancing that against a good application review time in an admissions office.
Ah, the beloved MCAT. Few premeds would miss it if disappeared. However, if you are truly interested in medicine, you better start to love standardized examinations, because they will just keep coming, faster, longer, and more demanding of your time and money. Taking the MCAT is a complicated proposition these days. In “old days” one had but two choices for administration dates: April and/or August of every calendar year. If you did your homework on this issue, you understood that the August MCAT presented you with several distasteful and unnecessary challenges, so that pretty much squared up the reality of the situation real quick for a prospective medical student.
Since 2007, with the computerized administration of the MCAT becoming the norm, applicants now have 19-22 administrations to choose from. An unintended consequence of this for Texas applicants is the fact that there are seemingly too many to choose from. It’s too easy to pick a date, but then if it doesn’t work out, well, it’s super easy just to pick the next, and the next…
This causes problems on the back end for applicants. The whole process of getting your application in front of a medical school admissions officer is too complicated for this article, but just know that once you get past April of every year, your application is essentially falling behind some of the others in line, and ultimately reduced in the amount of time that it can be reviewed by an admissions officer.
Now don’t be alarmed; taking the MCAT past April can be ok, and that’s my point: The key to registering for the right MCAT administration is this: 1.) Maximize the time you have to prepare so that you don’t short change yourself with a bum score, and 2.) Minimize the time your application is sitting in the “Hold for MCAT” or “Incomplete” pile where it is not being looked at.
My recommendation is to take some sort of formal prep course for the MCAT, and then give your self enough time to take the test and get a good score. Keeping in mind that it takes 30 days to get your scores reported, taking the MCAT in July is longest you’ll want to give yourself. I advise this for 2 reasons: 1.) Medical schools in Texas will begin their application process in early June, so having an MCAT score ready to complete your application at this time is the optimal situation because it allows your file to be under review from the outset. 2.) After July, your scores will not be reported until August, at best 1 and 1/2 months away from the application deadline. Now if you have submitted your application prior to your selected MCAT administration, this isn’t that bad; but most applicants who take a late MCAT have also elected to wait to submit their applications when that score comes in. So, if your application is submitted in August – September and something goes wrong, you could find your self missing the majority of the admissions season. (June – December). This can be the kiss of death. I used to see it happen to people every single year…
WHEN THE APPLICATION OPENS
Don’t be a crazy person about it…
May 1. That seems simple enough, right? When I worked in the admissions office for Texas Tech’s School of Medicine, I had the job of building and maintaining the Secondary Application. Every year, in the wee hours of May 1, I would login to make sure the application was running properly and there would already be 30-50 applications completed. TMDSAS would pretty much always report the same thing. Now, my premeds would tell me at this point, “Trevor, whats your problem? You are always telling us to make an early application…” Yes, this is true, but there is no reason to be pathological about it. Sitting at your computer at 11:59 on April 30 so that you can be amongst the very first to submit your application does nothing for you. The person who submits the TMDSAS application on May 1 gets no more consideration than the person who submits it May 30. This is because none of the first digital and/or imaged records are transmitted to the medical schools until the first or second week of June. So relax, premeds. Go on that date, study for the MCAT or for those wonderful finals that will be coming around the corner at that time.
HAVE A GENERAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE TEXAS MEDICAL ADMISSIONS BUSINESS
Know how admissions offices do business!
Application timing was touched on a little earlier with regard to the MCAT, but this section deals more with your overall application and when to submit it. I hope it’s now obvious to my readers that an early application is important, but I’d like to detail why exactly — from the admissions officer side.
When an applicant hits the final “submit” button on their Interfolio/TMDSAS application this year, it will take 4-6 weeks for it to make it in front of an admissions officer, and that’s if everything is completed. There is no magical early date for submitting your application, but understand some of the facts before you get started. The application opens May 1. Now I distinctly remember, not all that long ago, in 2002, we (medical schools) started interviewing around Labor Day. It seems over the years, that medical schools have seemingly engaged in a small contest of one-ups-manship of who gets to claim the vaunted status of being the FIRST to conduct an interview day. Now I know people in every medical admissions office in Texas, so i say this affectionately, but with the interviews now starting in July, you, as the applicant need to be a bit more concerned.
I recommend an application submission sometime during May – June. This advice stands regardless of your MCAT status. Even if your MCAT date has yet to appear on the horizon, you still need to get the application in. TMDSAS will process your application with or without an MCAT score. Where it gets held up by not having a score is in the admissions office. This is the optimal situation if you are missing an MCAT when the application period opens.
If you wait for that score to come in and then apply, you have bought yourself 4-6 weeks of lag time during the interview season—and for no reason.
So if you are pushing that MCAT date out, just remember that the best situation is for medical schools to have your application and all of its supporting documents in so that all that’s missing is your MCAT.
One of the most important things to understand about timing is something I used to see sneak up on people who applied on or around the deadline. This is when an application was submitted and then took 4-6 weeks to come in and by the time the tidal wave of late applications was sorted out, a not so funny thing happened on the way to the market: all the interview slots were then full. When I first noticed it, the application period ended on October 31. Referred to by me as the “Trick or Treat” factor, this was a problem that was very largely rectified by the moving of the deadline to October 1; however, the point still stands. Just because you have awesome academics, etc. and your application is required to be reviewed by a medical school, doesn’t mean there will be an interview slot available should you choose to apply late. This is where knowing the deadlines that admissions officers must adhere to comes in handy.
All medical schools in Texas, except Baylor, must have a rank list submitted to TMDSAS by January 15. Because of this, most of the schools will wrap up their interviewing in December, and those dates are likely to fill up as early as November. Some medical schools will interview in January if it’s necessary; however, I can tell you that is not a preferred method because it turns the days and nights preceding the January 15 deadline, which are already long, into applicant ranking marathons that seem to go on without end.
The final element to this article, which will look like like a glaring omission to an admissions officer at this point, is rolling admissions. Rolling admissions is another topic, for another day, but the fact that an applicant can receive an offer from a medical school as early as November 15, is yet another reason, and perhaps the most important one for getting an application submitted in a timely fashion.
General Eisenhower once said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Make sure you have a solid plan for getting through the application process. The sooner you strategize, get your application submitted and completed, the more time you have for success, and perhaps, even more importantly the more time you’ll have to fix the things that will go wrong. Good luck this year!