Submitting Medical School Secondaries? Here's the Ideal Turnaround Time.

Now that you’ve finished your primary application, it’s time to gear up for secondary essays. After your primary application gets verified, your email inbox will flood with secondary applications. So how fast should you be submitting medical school secondaries? Read on to find out!

Once your primary application has been verified, schools will begin sending applicants school-specific applications known as “secondaries.” These applications can range anywhere from two to eight prompts on average. However, during my application cycle, I received multiple secondaries that exceeded that average. If you’re reading this before your application is verified, I highly recommend pre-writing some of your secondaries. This will help you get ahead of the workload.

This post is all about submitting medical school secondaries and how fast you should really be turning them around back to medical schools.

Similar to how it is advantageous to submit your primary application ASAP, it’s important to be timely with your secondaries. So how fast should you really turn around your secondary applications?

Check to See if the School Provides Guidelines

Before detailing what I believe is ideal, it’s extremely important that you read all messaging that comes from the medical schools. Once you receive the invitation to complete a secondary application, read the email to see if the school has a specific deadline. Most schools have an application deadline. However, some will also detail a “softer” deadline such as suggesting the secondary be returned within one week. If you are applying to a school that has this “soft deadline,” be sure to follow it.

But if Not, Here’s The Ideal Turnaround Time for Submitting Medical School Secondaries

So what if your school doesn’t have any sort of suggested due date? I suggest you create a spreadsheet that shows all the schools you have applied to and then rank them in order of priority. Use a “1” to indicate the schools that are in your top 5 choices. Then use a “2” for your next level priority schools, about another 5-10 schools, and then “3”s and “4”s. Use the chart below to see how fast you should be submitting your secondaries based on how you ranked them.

Submitting medical school secondaries should be done as fast as you can but as slow as you need to.

Now I want to reiterate that this is my opinion. I have heard that some schools track how long it takes you to turn around their secondary application. However, I am not entirely sure of the truth of that statement. Secondary season is definitely a lot of work. So while you should put in the time, don’t beat yourself up if you miss your ideal deadlines. I stuck to this system for about 80% of the schools I applied to. By the end of the summer, I ended up completing secondaries for 40 medical schools. I did this while working full-time which definitely hindered the amount of time I could dedicate to writing secondaries. But I did the best I could, and ended up getting accepted!

Overall, do the best you can to turn in your secondaries quickly without sacrificing the quality of your essays. These applications are school-specific, so do take care to make them intentional by doing your research before hitting submit!