THE APPLICATION PROCESS
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Most (but not all) individual schools of the health professions schools subscribe to one or another of their centralized application services. Allopathic medical schools have AMCAS; osteopathic schools, AACOMAS; dental schools, AADSAS; VMCAS for veterinary school and so on. You can easily access these from the Links & Resources page.

Be aware that certain individual medical schools do not participate in any central service, nor do any podiatric, physical therapy or physician assistant programs and for these you must write directly to each school in question asking for their unique application packets.

All application services require a basic processing fee ranging from $50 to $125 plus a sliding scale fee depending on the number of schools to which you request information to be sent. There is an additional fee at the time of submission of the secondary or supplemental application. This fee varies and is approximately the same for those schools that do not participate in a centralized application service.

AMCAS is the centralized application agency developed by AAMC to help simplify and standardize the process of applying to participating US medical schools. It does not make any admission decisions nor does it advise students where to apply; the individual medical schools are completely responsible for their own admissions decisions. AMCAS does save you a lot of work, however. For one application (submitted to AMCAS) you can apply to about one hundred and 115 participating schools. For the small number of non-participating schools, you must, unfortunately, submit a separate application for each one.

Schools, and their admissions committees, follow strict rules concerning procedures and deadlines. Therefore, get into the habit now of carefully reading instructions as you fill out the numerous forms and other paperwork with which you will have to contend over the ensuing months. See the timeline for information on when you should begin the application process.