How To Use Interfolio For Medical School

[Osias Baptist]

Assumethat your peers applying to med school also have high GPAs, MCAT scores and a thorough resume of extra-curricular and community-based activities. What sets you apart? Who you choose to provide a letter or support may make the difference between early admission or being chosen above other applicants. Do you have a professor, mentor, community leader or even someone in the medical field that can warmly vouch for you?

American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS) accepts letters of evaluation and distributes them to participating medical schools electronically. This service enables letter authors to send all letters to the AMCAS application rather than to each school.

If a medical school participates in the AMCAS Letters Service, all letters must be sent through the AMCAS application. Only a handful of U.S. medical schools do not participate in the AMCAS Letters Service.

You can upload letters electronically via the AMCAS Letter Writer Application, or Interfolio. Letters sent through Interfolio can take up to 3 business days to be marked as received within the AMCAS application. Letters uploaded through the AMCAS Letter Writer Application are immediately marked as received. If your letter writer uploaded a letter through the Letter Writer Application and the status of your letter is still "Not Received," advise your letter writer to try again. If you need an alternate option to submit letters, please contact us at (202)-828-0600 or am...@aamc.org.

Under no circumstances will AMCAS program provide applicants access to letters of evaluation. Read the AAMC's Data Privacy Policy and Maintaining the Confidentiality of Letters of Evaluation, from the Group on Student Affairs (GSA) Committee on Admissions (COA).

If your institution's premedical advising office provides a letter of evaluation service, you may be able to arrange to have all of your letters transmitted to the AMCAS application through that office. Talk with your advisor to determine which type of system is used at your institution (i.e., Committee Letter, Letter Packet, or Individual Letters).

This application enables letter authors to upload PDF versions of letter(s) securely to the AMCAS application. Your letter writer will be required to register as a letter writer and will need your AAMC ID and AMCAS Letter ID in order to upload your letter(s).

Make certain to add your AAMC ID and AMCAS Letter ID in your Interfolio account if you are an Interfolio user. These IDs must accompany your letter in order for your letter to be matched with your application.

How to use Interfolio:

Enter the letter entry/entries in the AMCAS application before you have them sent via Interfolio.

If submitting an Individual Letter to the AMCAS application, you should:

Only a handful of medical schools choose not to participate in AMCAS Letters. If a medical school participates, all letters must be sent to the AMCAS application.

Non-participating Medical Schools:

Letters sent through Interfolio can take up to 3 business days to be marked as received within the AMCAS application. Letters uploaded through the AMCAS Letter Writer Application are immediately marked as received. If your letter writer uploaded a letter through the Letter Writer Application and the status of your letter is still 'Not Received,' advise your letter writer to try again.

If approved for the Fee Assistance Program, you will receive a waiver for all AMCAS fees for one (1) application submission with up to 20 medical school designations ($1,030 value). Benefits are not retroactive.

Letters of Evaluation are an important portion of the medical school application. You should familiarize yourself with the types of letters of evaluation each medical school requires well before you head into the application cycle.

Most medical schools require a minimum of 3 letters, but the AMCAS application allows you to submit up to 10. You are not required or necessarily expected to have 10 letters; schools often have their own specific letter caps. For example: Medical College of Georgia accepts up to 7 letters, but Mercer allows 6, Emory allows 5, and Morehouse only 3.

In practice, most applicants have 4-6 letters, and there is such a thing as too many letters. It is more important that you have strong, substantive letters than it is for you to have the maximum number of letters. This does not mean that you cannot collect the maximum if you know you can get 10 strong letters. In the AMCAS application, you can assign different letters to different schools. This means that if you do have 10 letters and a school only accepts 5, you can choose which 5 to send to that specific school.

The AACOMAS application allows up to 6 letters, and 3 is the recommended minimum. Unlike with the AMCAS application, you cannot assign different letters to different schools, so you must make sure you choose your 6 letters wisely.

Individual medical schools are quite specific in the number and types of letters of evaluation they expect from applicants. Therefore, you should be selective in who you ask to submit letters on your behalf and you should always double-check the individual requirements of each school to which you want to apply. Remember that while you do want to make sure that you are satisfying the requirements of the schools to which you are applying, it is equally critical that you obtain letters from evaluators who know you well and can speak positively on your behalf.

If you have done research, you should always plan to include a letter from your research mentor. If you are in a hard science lab, this letter will likely be one of your core science letters as mentioned above. However, letters from research mentors in other areas, such as psychology or sociology, are extremely valuable as well and you should include them. Research mentors often have a chance to get to know their students well making this one of your strongest letters.

In addition to the science letters, you should obtain a letter from a physician with whom you have shadowed or volunteered. While this letter is not always explictly required, it is almost always expected. If you are applying to D.O. programs, you are highly encouraged to get a letter from a D.O. if possible.

There are some medical schools that require a non-science faculty letter, so make sure you cultivate relationships with non-science faculty as well since you may opt to apply to one of those programs, e.g. Harvard. Beyond that, you can include additional letters from other professors you may have worked closely with (for instance, as part of your double-major, minor, or certificate program), other physicians or healthcare professionals you have shadowed under or worked with, volunteer coordinators, etc.

When asking for a letter of evaluation, it is important that you do so in person. Emailing or calling to set up a meeting or appointment is acceptable but you should request the letter face to face. Further, you should schedule an appointment with each of your evaluators by early Spring (no later than April) of the year you wish to apply to medical school. Your evaluator will need time to work on your letter, so be courteous and respectful. Do not forget that they are likely receiving requests from other students as well.

Due to the size of UGA, it can be difficult to generate 3 to 5 strong letters from college faculty and staff who know you very well and can offer significant insight into your character traits and capacity for entering the profession of medicine. Therefore, it is important that you not only work actively to build relationships from early on, but also that you provide your evaluators with as much information as possible when you do request a letter:

We encourage you to consider using Interfolio to collect and submit your letters of evaluation. Interfolio's primary purpose is letter storage, so you can begin collecting letters before the application cycle opens. You can set up an Interfolio account for free to begin storing documents. However, in order to transmit your letters to the application service (AMCAS or AACOMAS), you must pay to upgrade to Dossier Delivery for a flat rate of $48 per year. Your letters will be maintained even if your delivery account expires and you can renew your account any time.

If you do not opt to use Interfolio to store your letters, your evaluators will need to upload the letters directly to AMCAS. To do so, you must provide each of your letter writers with the AMCAS Letter Request Form. Keep in mind that the Letter Request Form does not become available until the AMCAS application opens (early May). Do not attempt to generate a form early (i.e. from the previous year's application) as your letters will not be correctly matched to your application.

If you do not opt to use Interfolio to store your letters, your evaluators will need to upload the letters directly to AACOMAS. When the application opens in early May, you will be able to add new evaluators in the "Supporting Information" section of the application. Be sure that all of the information that you enter about the evaluator is accurate and that you include the correct email address for that person. Once you complete an entry, AACOMAS will send an email to your evaluator with an upload link for their letter. It is your responsibility to make sure that your evaluator is expecting this email. (Don't forget to have your evaluator check their spam folder since the email sometimes gets filtered out!)

If you are re-applying to a professional school and the Pre-Professional Advising Office previously uploaded a letter packet for you, the office will re-submit the letter packet for you upon request, if no changes or updates to the original letter packet have occurred. The Pre-Professional Advising Office will only maintain student files for previous applicants (letter packets) for 5 years; after which they are destroyed.

If you are requesting updated letters or changes to your original letter packet, please email ptol...@uga.edu, so Ms. Pamela Tolbert can return them to your faculty and staff letter writers. Please note: Revised letters must be submitted directly to AMCAS, AACOMAS, or professional schools by the letter writers.

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