Thank-you notes

I just sent "official" thank-yous to the three professors who wrote me Letters of Recommendation.  I included a Starbucks gift card as a token of appreciation (something you should not forget to do for your LoR writers).  I probably should have sent them a little earlier, but given money has been tight, this was the best time.

The letters of recommendation you receive can make or break your application.  You can sound like a genius with your other stats, but if a professor who is supposed to talk you up and recommend you for medical school instead tells the admissions committee that you are a tool, you are pretty much screwed.  The fact that you have the letters sent to AMCAS directly by the professor or letter gathering service means you don't know what the professor says about you before the medical school sees it. 

Many schools have a pre-med committee that writes a letter recommending you to medical schools on behalf of the university.  Often, you talk to individual professors and have them send a personal letter of recommendation to the committee, and the committee letter includes these.  This can create a problem if a student has not spent any time seeing his pre-med adviser, or the committee otherwise has a reason to not recommend the individual.  For example, if a university prides itself on having 90% acceptance of pre-meds from their school into medical school, it is in their interest to deny a committee letter for a student with marginal statistics.  That marginal applicant then faces even more trouble getting into medical school, since the admission committee members (Adcoms) will wonder why the applicant's undergraduate institution didn't include a pre-med committee letter.

Either luckily or unluckily, my school does not have a pre-med committee.  Obviously, medical schools Adcoms know what schools do and what don't have such a committee, so there is no penalty to me for not providing a committee letter.  They have a letter service though, so I had my three professors send their letters to the advising office, and the advising office sent a letter packet to AMCAS.  This letter packet was available to the medical school when they wanted to view my secondary application.  Since I did not undergo a formal post-bachelor program, I may have faced a lot of trouble getting an official pre-med committee to write a recommendation for me.

Luckily, the letters provided must have been positive and strongly recommended me since I received an interview invite.  Hopefully I will not need to ask them to write letters for me again next year.