June 30th MCAT

WayOutWestMom
Fri, 10 May 2019 17:29:10 +0000

. If I understand correctly, we can just add schools throughout the application cycle and they will be sent to those schools the next transmittal day?

Yes, that’s what happens; however, adding a school after mid September is an exercise in futility. The school has to receive your application, process it, send you a secondary which you have to complete and return, upload your LORs, etc–this all takes times, usually a couple of weeks (best case, often longer). Then your app has to have in-house review, then sent to the full adcomm for decision review–and adcomms don’t meet regularly. This takes more time. Schools have been reviewing applications since early to mid -August. IIs started being tendered in mid-to-late August. Schools only have limited number of interview slots. Adding a school in September or later means your application will get fewer passes through the sift heap, be compared against a larger number of other applicants and will have fewer available interview slots you’ll be competing for. Some schools have tendered all their IIs by October. Most of the rest are done tendering IIs by Thanksgiving/early December. So unless you’re an exceptional candidate, applying earlier is better.

Also, the purpose of the throwaway school is to speed up the verification process, so is that to circumvent the “summer application traffic” everyone talks about? Thanks!

The summer application traffic period is early June through about mid-August when the AMCAS pipeline looks like a snake trying to swallow an elephant. Whether you apply in June or in late July you’re going to be smack in the middle of it. By using a throwaway school, you’ll be getting in the verification queue earlier and therefore get processed sooner than if you had waited until after your MCAT scores came back to get in line.