Applying to medical school and trying to figure out what the Amcas primary application is? You’ve come to the right place! Today, I’ll be walking you through the entire structure of the application and breaking down each section as I go. This article will leave you feeling much more acquainted with the general structure and flow of the application!
If you’re applying to medical school now or in the near future, you’ve probably heard of the AMCAS application. You may, however, be wondering what in the world is a primary application and why is it called that? I’ll explain what it is and everything that goes into it in this article.
The AAMC is the company that owns the AMCAS application system. AMCAS stands for American Medical College Application System and consists of these main components:
- Your demographics and parental info
- Your GPA history at all universities attended
- MCAT score history
- Up to 15 activity slots
- Letters of recommendation
- Personal statement (called “personal comments”)
The demographics section is really just as if you’re filling out a scholarship application or google form. It’s your standard age, address, race/ethnicity, parental income, and how you paid for undergrad.
The GPA history you enter yourself. Keep in mind that this is for every institution and class you have ever had! So even that one dual enrollment class you had or that random community college summer class. Once you’ve entered each class with the grade and credit hours, it’ll be subjected to the AAMC’s verification workers who calculate your core GPA and BCPM (bio, chem, physics, and math) GPA. They’ll also check the official transcripts from each school to confirm that you entered your classes correctly.
Make sure you take great care to enter it all correct! If they find an error, they will delay marking your application as verified which can slow your application by weeks!
MCAT score history is automatically updated. So, whatever MCAT scores you’ve had in the past will show up and so will your most recent. That’s about it on this section!
Next, you can add up to 15 different activities. There are categories for this so you have to pick what fits your activity best, but it encompasses everything, even hobbies! Here are the options:
- Artistic Endeavors
- Community Service/Volunteer – Medical/Clinical
- Community Service/Volunteer – Not Medical/Clinical
- Conferences Attended
- Extracurricular Activities
- Hobbies
- Honors/Awards/Recognitions
- Intercollegiate Athletics
- Leadership – Not Listed Elsewhere
- Military Service
- Other
- Paid Employment – Medical/Clinical
- Paid Employment – Not Medical/Clinical
- Physician Shadowing/Clinical Observation
- Presentations/Posters
- Publications
- Research/Lab
- Social Justice/Advocacy
- Teaching/Tutoring/Teaching Assistant
In total, there’s 19 of them. You can only choose one though! What I found was that a lot of my activities could be multiple of these, so I just had to pick the one I felt it best represented.
Within each individual activity, you will have to type out the:
- Experience name
- Contact name, their title, email address, and phone number
- Organization name
- City/state/country
- Most meaningful experience (Yes or no question, you can have a max of 3 of these)
- Completed hours (plus start and end date)
- Anticipated hours (plus start and end time)
Now, these are all kind of self explanatory, but I wanted to explain the meaningful experience designation. These are experiences that you deem to be the “most meaningful” in your journey and as a result, they give you more character count/words to explain it. You normally get 700 characters to give your description and with this designation, you get an additional 1,350 characters. That’s a huge increase! With this, you can tell stories or really explain why it was important and what you did.
As far as anticipated hours go, I find and have read that most admissions committees don’t factor this much into your actual hours. They really just care about how many you have COMPLETED. However, it is good to show them that you will be continuing these activities all the way up until you plan to stop. Ideally, you would stop these when you graduate college or show up to medical school so May or July of that next summer.
Letters of recommendation can be added onto the form too. Here, you enter their name, title, contact email, and organization affiliation. Make sure you keep up with your letter writers! You need at least 3 and some folks have up to 10. You can even select which letters go to which school if you have some you don’t want to go to your whole list.