Medical School Application Timeline
“Medical school admission is on a rolling basis.”
Applying to medical school takes a full year. A lot of students get confused about this and gap years. Be sure to check out my post about gap years. Medical school admission is on a rolling basis, meaning the later you get into the cycle, the less seats there are to claim. Here’s a rough idea about how the cycle goes:
May: The application cycle opens up. AMCAS allows you to begin filling out your application early May, but you are not allowed to click submit before some time around May 30. So you have a month to just fill out the application
“You cannot edit your primary application once submitted, you can however add more schools later.”
June: Once you can submit AMCAS will start verifying applications. In order for your application to get verified, you need to have your transcripts marked received by AAMC, submit your primary to at least one medical school, and have your writing (personal statement, disadvantage statement, activities description) completed. You cannot edit your primary application once submitted, you can however add more schools later. Usually on the last Friday of June, the first batch of verified applications will get sent to medical schools.
July: Starting from that Friday in June all through July, August, and even September October, you will start getting secondaries from medical school. Medical schools will begin reviewing completed applications (verified primary and submitted secondary, along with received MCAT & CASPR scores, and letters of recommendation) in July. By mid/end of July, schools have already begun inviting applicants for interviews. I received about 2-3 interview invites in July, which made me really excited because I felt “ahead of the game” and felt like my cycle was off to a good start.
August: While applications are still being verified and secondaries still being sent and received, medical schools will being interviewing. I had my very first medical school interview in August at Kaiser. 💁🏾💅🏾
Sept - March: It’s officially interview szn. Usually medical schools will stop interviewing applicants around Feb/Mar. In October medical schools are officially allowed to being accepting people into their school, however, they are allowed to reject students before October (RIP). I continued interviewing until October because by October I have gotten five acceptances into medical school, so I no longer felt the need to interview anymore and my credit cards were basically maxed out at this point. Applying to medical school is not cheap. Also October is a great time to fill out your FAFSA whether you’ve heard back from schools or not.
Apr-May: Decisions. Decisions. Around this time you have probably heard from your schools and are deciding where to go. I had such a hard time with this, I’ll be making a blog post about this. Some are waiting to hear from the waitlist, yes, students surely do get off the waitlist around May and June.
July: You will most likely matriculate into medical school around July/Aug. Congrats, you are a whole MS1/OSM1!
See AAMC for more details.
