 So you're about to apply to medical school and everybody around you is just pulling out their hair and about to have hair loss like me. But what instead could you do to make sure that 2020 or whatever you're applying to medical school, the process of stress periods exactly, we'll talk about this video. All right guys, welcome to another episode of the MD journey. We're here, we're all about helping people just like you succeed on a medical journey with less stress. My name is Lex, I'm currently an internal medicine resident. So if you are new to this channel, I've been helping people like you through blog posts, videos and now podcasts. And so this is the first time stopping by and definitely consider hitting a subscribe button on YouTube, as well as subscribe and follow along podcast if you're listening. And after going through the video, if you enjoy the content, then go ahead and hit that like button to support and make sure it gets out in front of more people. But today I want to speak to the pre-meds on the other side of this camera, who are possibly going to be applying to medical school within the next few months, as well as in the future whenever you're watching this, of how to make the process less stressful, what kind of things you should be doing, what type of timeline it should create for you to make the process both effortless as well as kind of stress-free. That way when your peers are freaking out, you're like, well, good, just waiting on my admission letters to come in. But in all reality and seriousness, we just want to make sure that you're doing the things from start to finish, they're going to help you obviously get in front of the eyes of med school admission boards without feeling stressed out in the months of July, August, and September. So in this episode, I'm going to give you a step-by-step approach to kind of help you through the application process and making it stress-free. And if you enjoy the content and want to learn a little bit more about how to do well on your pre-med journey, then one great resource that I recommend is you guys check out one of the ebooks that we have on Amazon for $0.99 called the pre-med journey. And this book is essentially a blueprint from start to finish on how to succeed on your pre-med journey and eventually get that coveted med school acceptance. Let's get into today's video. And the first thing that I want you to do to make this experience less stressful is to actually keep a list of your experiences. And I recommend if you haven't done this, then to start the fall semester of, I guess, your third year of college or your spring semester of the year that you're going to apply and make a list of everything you've done. This is not a CV. You can just simply be a Word document and go ahead and just simply type in every experience. And these experiences can be a variety of sizes. It can be really impactful. That can be something that you just took one time. And now the next thing that I want you to do is look through each experience and simply type in two or three bullet points of your biggest takeaways from that experience. So for example, maybe as part of a community service project you worked a weekend with Habitat for Humanity, maybe you're helping build a home for somebody you need. You may have enjoyed working with a team and other individuals who all had a common goal of helping this one person that could use their service. So those would be some takeaways and then you would put in the Word document. And we just kind of came up with those kind of on the fly. But they sound pretty amazing. And essentially what you would do is you would go through each of the experiences and you would truly take some reflection. This is not a one day kind of activity. It's something you can do over the course of a week or two. But the idea is you're going to have all the experiences you've done, all the community service, anything academic related, anything research related, any shadowing experience. And this can be as you know, as far back as kind of later years in high school, if you kind of have something, as well as your early years in college. And if you take a gap here, then those experiences are also included. But then you're able to do a few things with these takeaways. One, you're able to use them in your essays, you're able to use them in your applications. It also helps to form some common themes of what is important and what experiences you value. For example, you may see after a list of 20 experiences that really only four or five are the most pertinent and the ones that speak most directly to your desire to become a physician. Now, going off of our last example with Habitat for Humanity, maybe you realize you do enjoy working with your hands. And the other four experiences on this list also had something of similar nature. And then use these experiences and kind of create a cohesive theme about enjoying working with your hands and maybe considering a field of surgery or something interventional or procedural. And you can use this in your personal statement, application, as well as your interview process. Simply taking the time to create a list of all your experiences, not just a CV, ask yourself, what did I really take away from each experience is going to help you kind of find a common theme. If you could do that, you're already one step ahead of most med students because the typical approach is most med students will create a list and they'll categorize them into community service, they'll categorize them into shadowing to research. But there's no common theme that they may have through their applications, just experience loading. And if you're a, if you're like any med student, and if you're like any pre-med, it's typical to want to do a lot to stuff your application. But it's very difficult at times to be able to distinguish what your goals and what the common themes and virtues you value as a future physician to definitely do this experience exercise. Let me know what you guys think in the comment section down below, but it's going to help with some of the few things that we're going to talk about later in this episode. Now it's the second thing that I want you to do. And again, I'm going to assume that this is late fall as well as early spring of the year you'll be applying, is to do a mini of personal stuff. And now I know whenever I talk about essays, people start freaking out, you get anxiety, you may feel like you're at writer's block, you're not a good writer. But this is not the final personal draft. It's not even the true personal draft. This can be a paragraph two or three, simply answering the question, why do you want to become a physician without getting really fluffy? And the reason for this personal statement is two things. One, to make sure, you know, did your takeaway practice from the first tip help you identify some common themes of what you want, what your goals may be, even if everything is not crystal clear, that's okay. But you may start getting a direction. And two, you can then use this personal statement again, it can be a very sketchy draft with the least and decent grammar. You can then give it to your letter writers in the next tips that we'll talk about and give them an indication of why you want to go into medicine and what experiences you've had. And again, you want to see if your common themes can be tested. And your letter writer may tell you, you know, this is a good approach. These are good reasons to go into medicine, and they can use those and their letters of recommendation to give you that brings us into the third step. Or the third tip is to ask for your letters of recommendation early and ask for multiple of them. And so most med schools will ask for anywhere from three to upwards to five letters of recommendation. And it's important to over the years, obviously, to have an idea of who could write one. Definitely during your spring semester, you may have one or two professors that you may want to ask. If you've done research with somebody, you may want to consider having a letter from them. The bottom line is it's better to have more letters of recommendation than you would use for certain institutions. But once you identify potential letter writers, make sure you meet with them and email them and then ask them if they're willing to write you a strong recommendation for medical school. If they're just going to write you a template where they kind of fill in your name, your GPA, how you did in the class, that's not the letter you want. Essentially better not having that than having it in the first place. So definitely make sure they're willing to write you a strong one if not considered going elsewhere. Once your potential letter writers agree, it's important to one, give them that mini personal statement that you wrote as well as your list of experiences and your takeaways, and then also give them an actual formal CV. This way they can kind of see a cohesive idea of everything you've done, why it's important to you and why you want to go into medicine, and ideally the letter that they'll give you will be better. And it's important to also give them a deadline of a week and a half to two weeks before the actual application goes live. Because this is the big thing that I want to mention in this video that will help your whole experience become stress-free. So listen up, pro tip, you know, like alarm, start listening, the phone away. And that is, you are going to have an easier time getting into medical school, a less stressful experience if you get your application within the first week that it goes live. I know this is not going to happen for every individual, for different circumstances, maybe you have to retake your MCAT and you have to wait for the score to come back, or you're waiting to get your final transcript. But for most people, your goal should be that first week, either the first two or three days, your application is submitted and it's done. And the reason for this is imagine your admission for it. The application pools are starting to come, they're going to come in quick on the first day, which is like May 1st, May 30th, depending on the application and the location you're at. But as I see more and more applications through the month of May, June and July, I may see a lot of those students that have similar applications. And later on in the process, I may say you have to do a little bit more to impress me. It's just very natural to have that bias. You know, you're initial, you're not sure if there's going to be something better later on in the pipeline. So you might as well just take and give that person an interview versus later on, you've seen enough of what the applicant pool looks like, your threshold of what's acceptable for an interview is going to be hired. So it's important for you as an applicant to get that application to them in front of them quicker, that way that threshold amount of applicants that they've seen before years is not as much as they would see in let's say July or August. So that's the biggest takeaway from this video is to get that application in early, which is why the process that I'm walking you through in this video is giving you kind of a step by step of how to make sure that application gets submitted on the first few days that it goes live. Now going down our window, I'm trying to make the process less stressful is I want you to start looking at the schools you're interested in. Sometimes there may be a generic application depending on what state you're in or if you're applying nationally to go ahead and start creating a list of all the problems you may have to do. So there's going to be a generic application that I'll link down below to the generic nut school application as well as there's one for like the state of Texas and they usually use the same prompts every single year so it's not like you have to wait for the application to go live to see what your essay should be about just simply look at what it was last year, the year before and if it's been the same it's likely going to be the same thing again. So go ahead and have that as your main prompt for that application and some schools will also have what they call secondary applications. They may have certain questions and essays they want you to write for their institution and depending on the institution they may just send you a secondary application as soon as you send them the first one or they may want to evaluate the first one and then send it a secondary to a certain amount of students but assume that you're going to get that secondary application from those institutions. It's important to create a list of all the essays. There's definitely going to be some overlap where you ask similar questions between an institution and applications so you want to at first start prioritizing working on your actual personal statements these are the big essays and then start to go ahead and work on the prompts for the secondary essays. Your goal should be depending on when you're watching this video and how far you are from applying is to have those essays you know started in the month of March and April that way when May comes around your essay is done it's been reviewed by a few people it's obviously check the grammar and for quality and you're happy with them because in that first week that application goes live you're not worried and focused on trying to get your essay to be perfect and other people to review it instead you're just kind of plugging and checking the application you're copying and posting your essay it was again the experience is not stressful and I know a lot of you guys may think this is a lot but I promise you if you don't take this advice I've seen it on the other end where I've given this advice to pre-meds and then they're still working on their essays in the month of June and July and that may not seem like a big deal because the med school applications will go live and continue all the way till October so you're like well I have enough time remember that concept I told you there are people that have already submitted their application while you're still working on your essays and so there's admission boards who are evaluating their for interviews they've already seen what their essay is and the application looks like and here you are still trying to get your essay to be perfect and your threshold of likely getting interviews and get higher and higher so just make sure you understand that concept that you obviously want to work on these essays earlier you still want the quality you want to work on them earlier and if you're working on them in the month of June and July you're already behind the April my last tip on this timeline to make the experience less stressful is to make sure you give yourself as well as your letter writers and any other person responsible for a part of your application whether that may be proofreading your essays or anything of the sort is to give them a deadline of one and a half weeks to two weeks before the deadline so if the essay and the application goes live on May 1st then make sure that like April 15th is your deadline all your letters and recommendations should come in people who are responsible for reading your essays start to give you feedback because then that gives you two weeks to go ahead and just tidy everything up maybe give the letter writer an extra week to get everything in maybe you have some tech issues where things aren't getting submitted the way you wanted them to or maybe you need to work on and that's a little bit more after a reviewer gives you some feedback on that little two week buffer is going to be a time around okay stressing out application about to go live but when the application does go live you know ideally you've given yourself enough time to make some adjustments and fix your essays have your letters and recommendations in and then you can ideally just copy and paste and hit so I know that was a lot guys and honestly you can be stressful when I break the process in that form because it seems like you're doing a lot of work when you're taking classes and you're thinking about graduation and things of that sort why can't you just push this to May June and July but we've already talked about why so make sure you set aside some time your spring semester your fall semester to really help the process become stress-free when it's time to apply as well as giving yourself the best chance of getting accepted that's basically my blueprint on how to make the application part less stressful but if you do want a blueprint on how to make the whole pre-med experience less stressful i'm including how to study how to become more productive as a college student as well as the application process for also things like studying for the MCAT as well as interviewing and getting accepted from medical school you guys can check out one of the courses that we have and offer on the journey called the pre-med blueprint where we walk you from start to finish regardless of what phase your pre-med journey you're in there's something for you to make the process more expedited like we talked about in this video and of course if you guys have more questions for your pre-med journey your medical journey you guys just drop them down in the comment section down below if you made it to this far that video and the like button still hasn't been clicked but you've enjoyed the content then go ahead and support the channel by just hitting the like button maybe two times and if you're also new to the channel and you haven't hit that subscribe button then go ahead and hit that subscribe button hit that notification bell to get two videos just like this on a weekly basis that's it for this episode guys thank you so much for watching thank you so much for listening if you're listening on the podcast and i will see you guys in future videos thanks for being a part of my journey hopefully i've been able to give you guys on yours and see you guys in the next one peace