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One of the rare pieces of medical school admissions advice that all of us can agree on is that the sooner you submit your applications, the better. That way, you can take full advantage of the rolling admissions process and maximize your odds of getting into medical school.
However, “apply early” doesn’t address the all-important questions of when you should aim to complete each component of your application—personal statement, Work and Activities section, secondary essays—or when you should collect required materials like recommendation letters.
Therefore, we developed a recommended medical school application timeline to help ensure that you submit your materials early and do so with the highest quality and least anxiety. Our timeline does not include general advice like “save money for your applications,” “keep working hard in classes and extracurricular activities,” or “attend medical school admissions fairs.” Instead, it exclusively focuses on when you should complete various pieces of your applications.
Of course, everyone’s situation is different, so it’s essential to be flexible with your medical school application timeline. If you begin your application process sooner (for example, some of our students begin working on their personal statement as early as the September before their application year), you’ll have more time to tackle each component and can, therefore, spread your work out. You may even be able to pre-write a significant number of secondary applications. Conversely, if you start working on your applications later than we recommend, you’ll have to move things along more quickly.
The latter point is very important to keep in mind. Just because you may start your application process later than we recommend doesn’t mean all is lost; far from it! Just make sure to work diligently, and never submit less than your best work just to get things in “early” (more on what “early” and “late” mean in the FAQ section at the end of this article). Quality always trumps speed.
For specific application deadline dates, we encourage you to visit the AMCAS (MD schools), AACOMAS (DO schools), and TMDSAS (Texas public schools) websites.
Without further ado, here’s our recommended timeline:
