3 Steps to Preparing your Med School Application while Studying for the MCAT

Because most students take the MCAT around the same time that they are applying to medical school, it is crucial that you find a careful balance between the time you spend on your application and MCAT prep. Here’s how it’s done:

(1) Set a goal for when you will get your primary application completed. When it comes to the AMCAS application, I’d recommend having it completed by the end of May so that you can submit it on the first day it can be submitted at the beginning of June. If you are applying to Texas schools, DO schools, or other non-traditional schools, however, you will want to carefully research their important dates as you begin to plan how you are going to slay the application beast ahead of you.

(2) Make a list of every task you need to complete before submitting your application. Once you’ve made this list, you should put the tasks in priority order and assign a due date to each one. You may think that you just need to focus all your energy on the MCAT and that you will just think about the application once this MCAT is out of the way, but this will not work. Some aspects of the application could take months for you to complete. For instance, if you wait until the last minute to ask for letters of recommendation, it will likely be too late since your professors will all be too busy to help you. Not to mention, if you have to rush someone to write a letter for you, chances are they won’t do a very good job.

(3) Plan each task into your MCAT study timeline. Treat application tasks with the same respect that you give to your MCAT studying assignments by planning them into your schedule at the same time. Remember this, a top MCAT score will do you no good if you don’t have a solid application to go along with it. Both are extremely crucial to earning you acceptance to the medical school of your dreams. Do yourself a big favor by giving both the application and your MCAT studying the due diligence they deserve.

If you are not sure what exactly you need to have accomplished in order to submit your primary application, be sure to take advantage of my Medical School Application Course. It will walk you through every task you need to complete and provide you with key tips for composing a stellar application. And best of all, it comes with full access to awesome tools such as my Medical School Application Spreadsheet that will help you stay 100-percent organized. You won’t want to miss out on this crucial resource.

As always, if you have any questions at all, please be sure to reach out. I am here to help! 🙂

Warm regards,

Andrew  George

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How we Matched up the Khan Academy Passages with the eCourse Lessons

Each lesson of the eCourse contains links to 1 to 5 Khan Academy science passages for the purpose of providing you with non-AAMC material to practice your science passage reading skills on. By completing all the linked passages within every lesson, you will have finished all the freely available Khan Academy science passages.

To match up the Khan Academy Science Passages with the eCourse lessons, we carefully examined the passage and question content of each one. Then we decided which lesson of the eCourse best correlated with that content. You may notice that some passages don’t match up perfectly with the current lesson. If they don’t match up with the current lesson, they should match up with one of the previous lessons in the module. We did this carefully so that you could practice your science passage reading skills on passages that contain the content you’ve already learned.

Why we don’t recommend non-AAMC CARS practice questions

We recommend practicing CARS by reading non-AAMC CARS passages but not doing the associated practice problems. The reason we don’t recommend doing the practice problems is because the MCAT is written by the AAMC. They have a very unique style in which they write CARS practice questions that third-party companies (try as they might) are unable to replicate. When students spend time on non-AAMC CARS practice problems, they get familiar with the wrong style of questioning, leading them to overthink and incorrectly respond to the questions written by the AAMC. Thus, it is in your best interest to solely practice on AAMC CARS practice questions.

That said, we highly recommend practicing your reading skills on non-AAMC CARS passages. In our Ultimate CARS Strategy Course, we provide you with 1,000 free CARS passages and 100+ homework assignments, giving you ample material to practice on. Reading countless passages while practicing the proper reading habits and strategies will prepare you well to conquer the CARS section as it was written by the AAMC.

Which books do the lessons match up with?

The books we use in each lesson are linked below. We plan to stick with these older editions of the books since very little has changed and the older editions are much more affordable:

First Edition of the Kaplan 7-book Series
First Edition of the Princeton 7-book Series

Do the chapters match up perfectly?

The Kaplan Books, Princeton Books, and Khan Academy Videos were all produced by different authors. For this reason, there are some chapters in the Kaplan Book or Princeton Book that are not even found in the Khan Academy Videos and vice versa. For instance, the Kaplan and Princeton Books have chapters that cover certain experimental procedures that the Khan Academy Videos do not cover.

Our goal in matching up the books with the videos was to correlate the content as best as possible while also covering ALL the content from every resource. For this reason, when nothing in the Kaplan Books matched up with one of the video playlists, instead of leaving the reading assignment for Kaplan blank, we inserted material that did not fit in anywhere else (i.e. one of those chapters on an experimental procedure that was not covered by Khan Academy). So, when the assignment doesn’t appear to match up right, please know that this was intentional.

*If you follow the reading assignments outlined, you will finish the entire Kaplan 7-book series and/or Princeton 7-book series by the time you finish all 10 content modules.

Do the sections match up perfectly?

If the sections assigned in our eCourse do not match up with the sections contained in your content review book, you may have a different edition. The sections should still match up the large majority of the time, but in the rare instance that they don’t, I’d recommend simply reading sections that do match up and saving the ones that do not for a future lesson.

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