The central application services will start sending verified applications to medical schools at the end of June/beginning of July. You should visit each school’s website to learn how you will gain access to their secondary application.

When you receive a secondary application, give yourself a personal deadline of completing and submitting it two weeks from the time of receipt.

Many secondary applications have additional essays; some are "optional" essays. Read each secondary application carefully—if they are discouraging you from answering their optional essays unless you have new or unique information to add, there is no need to write anything. In all other cases, medical schools may believe that not answering an optional question is a missed opportunity to share more information.

Tips:

• Write an original essay, don’t simply recycle your personal statement in this space.
• Write something to further personalize the application when possible.

Some secondary applications will ask you to convert your Haverford credits to semester hours and to calculate GPAs for the core pre-medical courses. 1 unit of credit at Haverford is equal to 4 semester hours.