Application Process for Medical School

If you are starting the application process, it is vital that you inform the premed advisors (premed@centre.edu). All of their communication with applicants will be by email. We needs a list of students applying to medical school since there are some important meetings and forms that you need to fill out. 

There is a MANDATORY meeting in early September (see the events page for current dates) to fill out forms, talk about the timeline, committee letter of evaluation, and deadlines. If you miss this initial meeting, you must stop by Dr. Paumi or Dr. Young's office to fill out a form. 

The general timeline is as follows (specific dates/times will be announced by email during the year):

• September — First Pre-Health Society meeting to talk about application; start MCAT preparation. 

• September/October/November — Periodic workshops on writing the personal comments. See the events page for current dates.

• December — Complete a first draft of personal statement for the AMCAS/AACOMAS application. 

• January — Continue MCAT preparation.

• February — Mandatory meeting to talk about application process; Interview with HPAC; MCAT in April to July.

• March — Complete personal comments and resume by May 1; interview with HPAC.

• May — Access AMCAS application and/or AACOMAS application and start filling it out; MCAT scores back at some point; inform the premed advisors by email if you are definitely applying to medical school.

• July — The AMCAS/AACOMAS application should be complete by July 1 at the absolute latest! Await secondary applications. Dr. Paumi and Dr. Young will see which medical schools you are applying to on the AMCAS or AACOMAS website and send your Centre committee letter to the medical schools via the AMCAS letterwriter. They can also see which osteopathic medical schools you are applying to and send the committee letter to them.

• August — Complete secondary applications as soon as possible and then check with the medical school to make sure your application is complete. Await interviews.

Each applicant will be assigned an applicant coach following the first application cycle meeting. This person is your point person as you are preparing your activities list and personal statement. You will have 3 different meetings (more if you need) to discuss your documents. These are low stakes opportunities to talk to someone with experience preparing students to apply to health professional schools. You should take advantage of these meetings in the time frame described below. These meetings are another opportunity to demonstrate how prepared you are for the application process. 

• Meeting 1: Between the activities list workshop and the personal statement workshop – activities list conversation

• Meeting 2: Between the personal statement workshop and the end of the fall term – a personal statement conversation - wherever you are in your process. This can be a writing process/brainstorming session or edits/comments to a personal statement draft.

• Meeting 3: Between the start of Centre term and beginning of March - follow-up/review of activities list and personal statement

The application process outlined below starts two years before you matriculate at a medical school. In other words, if you plan on starting medical school in the fall of the year you graduate from Centre, you would begin the application process in the summer of the previous year. The process is an enormous time commitment and you need to decide IF you should be applying to medical school before you start. It is very important for you to schedule an appointment with Dr. Paumi or Dr. Young early in the fall of your third year. You need a realistic assessment of your chances based on your GPA and experience in medicine (you probably will not have taken the MCAT yet). If your GPA is below a 3.2 and/or you have little or no experience in medicine, then you probably should not start the application process. The process is essentially the same for allopathic and osteopathic. Some Centre students apply to both in a given year.

In order to more accurately present you as a candidate the Committee will interview you in the spring. Interviews are 45 minutes and are done by Dr. Young and at least one other member of the committee in her office.

1. The purpose of these interviews is to obtain information about you. They do not really simulate a medical school interview, although you may get asked the same questions.

2. We will ask questions like “Why do you want to be a physician” and “Tell us about the most significant volunteer experience you have had”. It will be helpful to you to assume that we do not know anything about you.

3. We will give you feedback on your answers.

4. We must have a copy of a personal statement and resume/CV before the interview (they do not have to be the final versions).

5. Feel free to provide further information to Dr. Young if something important is not covered in the interview.
    

AMCAS is the abbreviation for American Medical College Application Service. The AACOMAS application is essentially the same for osteopathic medical schools. You will apply to most medical schools in the US through AMCAS (the Texas medical schools have their own service). The way AMCAS works is that you fill out their application and indicate which medical schools you want that application sent to (it acts like a common application). Be sure to read the directions carefully. If you contact me with questions about the AMCAS primary application I will almost always tell you to read the directions or contact AMCAS directly. The medical schools look at the AMCAS application (which includes MCAT scores) and decide whether they want to reject you or get more information from you. If it’s the latter, they send you a secondary application which you must complete. It takes AMCAS and the medical schools some time to process applications, so IT IS VITAL THAT YOU SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATIONS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. You should plan on submitting your AMCAS application in early June. Every year there are a few Centre students who get rejected at medical schools because they failed to submit their applications early. You should submit your application even if you have not received your MCAT scores yet. It takes AMCAS about 4 weeks to process your application, but it only takes seconds for them to insert your MCAT scores. NOTE: You must release your scores to AACOMAS by going to your score report on AAMC. Medical schools have rolling admissions. Thus, the longer you wait, the worse your chances. If you submit materials on the deadlines, you probably will not get into medical school. The AMCAS application is web-based (you need access to the internet!) and a little time consuming. The fee for the AMCAS application is $175. That includes one medical school. Each additional medical school is $46. So, if you are going to apply to 5 schools, your AMCAS fee would be $359. AMCAS does offer fee waivers for qualified students. Note that medical schools themselves will impose an additional secondary fee. For example, UK charges $50. The AACOMAS fee is $198 and includes one school. Each additional school is $57.

There is a section on the AMCAS/AACOMAS application for you to disclose criminal or disciplinary behavior. Be sure that you disclose EVERY infraction that you have incurred. This disclosure includes minor things like original container issues. All medical schools now do criminal background checks. If you fail to disclose something it will probably result in your rejection from a medical school. You should check with the Dean of Students Office and the Associate Dean’s Office to see if there are any issues.

The only difficult part is the Personal Comments section. You must write a 5300 characters + spaces essay about anything you want, although it is best to write it on why you want to be a physician and what qualities you have/things you have done that make you a good candidate. You should start trying to write this essay long before you even fill out the AMCAS application. 

Some general pieces of advice are:

1. It must be personal! Do not have abstract statements in there about what it takes to make a good physician. Do not spend a lot of space talking about how much you admire your mother or father—it needs to be about you.

2. It should not be a laundry list of things you have done. Pick the four or five things that you are or which you have done that have motivated you to become a physician or that show qualities that would make you a good physician. For instance, you can write about your experience in a medical setting, a research project you have done, a study abroad experience, or leadership roles you have had. Make sure you write how these things have affected your desire to be a physician.

3. Avoid writing about things like GPA which will appear on your transcript or somewhere else in your application.

4. Do not use contractions.

5. Be sure to take up all of the space you are given. If your essay is significantly short, that might be interpreted that you are not that interesting a person. It is much easier for a pre-health advisor to help you cut things than it is for him to help you add things. As a general rule your first draft should be significantly longer than the 5300 characters with spaces that is allowed. Do not try to make it perfect before you show it to a pre-health advisor. Many students spend a lot of time trying to perfect an essay that is never going to be any good.

6. If you do send a copy to a pre-health advisor make sure you include your name in the filename. It is hard to keep track of a bunch of documents all named personalstatement.docx.

7. There is no reason that you cannot have versions that you write as a first, second, third, and fourth year student.

You are probably wondering what the committee letter of evaluation is. The HPAC solicits evaluations from up to five science professors and up to three non-science professors, administrators, or staff members. You indicate to the HPAC which professors know you the best and the HPAC sends them the evaluations. Your professors will evaluate you on academic abilities, personal attributes, and professional promise. Here are the AAMC guidelines for a letter of evaluation. Your professors will check the appropriate boxes and write as many comments as they want. The HPAC collects all evaluations for applicants and compiles them into one composite form. The HPAC will also include a brief paragraph comparing you to other applicants from Centre in the last few years. There are a few details of the composite that you need to understand:

1. Medical schools prefer committee evaluations if the college has a health professions advising committee (like Centre does). Medical schools also prefer that the letter is confidential. HPAC will indicate that the letter is confidential. 

2. There are a lot of categories your professors will be evaluating you on (not just what grades you got in their classes), so it is essential for you to get to know your professors well and tell them about your motivations for medicine. Look at each of those categories and ask yourself “What box is Prof. X going to check”? Is there anything that you can do to influence positively what box your evaluator checks? You should schedule a meeting with each of your evaluators and provide them with a copy of your resume and personal statement.

3. The committee evaluation only contains evaluations from Centre people. You can have other letters from people you worked with in the medical field sent directly to AMCAS (see below) after you complete your secondary applications.

4. Centre professors will try to be as accurate as possible in their evaluation of you. Do not expect to get a glowing recommendation if you did not perform well in a class or if the professor does not know you well. You can get better evaluations by getting to know your professors better.

5. Generally, science majors will have five science professors and two non-science people evaluate them. Non-science majors will usually have four science professors and three non-science people as their evaluators. 

6. If you are an athlete, do not use both your head coach and assistant coach. Just pick one. We have seen in the past that they tend to say similar things and we want your evaluators to have different information to contribute to your overall evaluation. 

One part of the AMCAS application is called the Letter of Recommendation/Evaluation section. (There is a similar section on AACOMAS.) It is in this section where you will indicate who is writing your letters. The directions are on the AMCAS application website and I have highlighted some of the important points here.

1. You will be getting one COMMITTEE LETTER from Centre and that counts as ONE of your 10 possible letters. The Centre committee letter only contains evaluators who are at Centre (or who have recently left the college). You may obtain additional letters from non-Centre people. Additional letters can come from an individual (physician or nurse for example) in the medical field with whom you worked or from a scientist with whom you did research. Do NOT have letters sent from individuals (like a family friend or the governor) who have no real knowledge of you and your qualifications for medical school.

2. You will need to assign a Letter ID (and it’s different than your AAMC ID) to each letter. Do NOT send the premed advisors anything! We will see the Letter ID on the AMCAS summary webpage that we have access to. On that summary webpage we also see all of the schools to which you are applying, your GPA’s, and your MCAT scores once your application is processed.

3. The contact information for the 2026 cycle committee letter will need to enter is shown below. 

Dr. Kari Young

Associate Professor of Chemistry

Centre College

859-238-5323

karin.young@centre.edu

4. You will need to have a Letter ID and contact information for each of your other letters.

5. Keep in mind that most medical schools prefer a maximum of 2-3 letters in addition to your committee letter. Even though you CAN enter 10 letters on AMCAS, you are strongly advised not to!

6. Once you have your letters you must assign them to each medical school–we cannot do that. You may choose not to assign the Centre College Committee Letter, but that will look VERY suspicious to the medical school and an admissions officer will probably contact us.

7. We will not complete and submit your committee letter until your application has been processed and we see your MCAT scores on the AMCAS site. Usually you can count on about 2 weeks for us to complete the letter after we see your scores and processed application. You do not need to tell us that your application has been processed or that you have received your MCAT scores–we will see all of that. We will check the AMCAS site about once a week. You should tell us when you are planning to take the MCAT. You will be able to see on your AMCAS application that your Centre committee letter has been uploaded.

8. You can assign the Centre committee letter to the medical schools AFTER submitting your AMCAS application, so don’t let that delay stop you from submitting.

I have compiled a list of things you should do and when you should do them below. Remember, the earlier you get things done the better your chances of getting into medical school. Follow the same steps for AACOMAS.

1. Request your transcript before leaving Centre for the summer. Be sure to request transcripts from other colleges you have attended. These transcripts must be official and sent directly to AMCAS. The transcript request form is part of the application.

2. Read the AMCAS instructions and access the application as soon as possible (early May).

3. Complete and submit your AMCAS application as soon as possible (July 1 at the latest). It is your responsibility to check that all outside information (transcripts and letters) have been sent in. Your Centre study abroad courses for Strasbourg, London, Merida And CentreTerm study abroad courses are entered normally into the AMCAS application–don’t do anything special or request a different transcript. Other programs where Centre is affiliated with a university (like Glasgow) get a separate entry and, perhaps, no separate transcript. You must list all of your courses, even if you repeated some.

4. At any time during the application process please inform the premed advisors (premed@centre.edu) if you have decided not to apply to medical school.

5. AMCAS and medical schools will communicate with you via email. Be sure to check your Junk email folder since sometimes the email filtering programs will redirect email to Junk.

6. Access secondary applications (normally the medical school will communicate with you via email with directions on how to access their secondary via the web) and fill them out as soon as possible.