3: How Much Does it Cost to Apply to Medical School? - a podcast by Ryan Gray

Session 03 Applying to medical school is expensive. There’s the cost of applications, travel, accommodations, food, and a suit. Make sure that you plan accordingly. This is a question from Tyrell who called in to ask about the cost of applying to medical school. She's still very early on in her prereqs but she wants to start saving now. This is a smart thing to do.
So how much should you be saving? What does it look like when it comes to applying to medical school.If you have any question you want answered, call 617-410-6747.
[01:07]Question from Tyrell Tyrell is an old premed calling from Columbus Ohio. She said she has seen data on the cost of application fees and secondaries. But she hasn't found any formal data that looks at the other kinds of expenses involved such as travel, lodging, food, attire, etc. She's trying to figure out how to start setting aside money to save up for this future expense.
[02:18]The Cost of Applying to Medical School: The Basics Looking at the basic cost of applications, AMCAS is $160 for the application that includes one school. The average number of schools is fifteen. To add additional schools to your application, that's $38 for AMCAS. So that's a total of $692 to apply to fifteen schools for the AMCAS application. That's just the primary application.
Now some students apply to both AMCAS and AACOMAS and some apply to fifteen at each.AACOMAS costs $195 for the initial primary application and $45 for every application after the first one. So if you apply to fifteen, that's $895. This is just the primary application.
[04:15]The Cost of Secondaries Assuming the cost of secondaries is $100 (some are $50 and some are $75), and assuming you apply to 30 schools (15 DO and 15 MD) and you turn them all in. That's $3,000 for secondary applications.
So you're looking at $3,000 for secondaries, $692 for AMCAS, $895 for the AACOMAS -  a total of $4,587 (let's round this up to $4,600) just to apply to medical school. That's not including what Tyrell was worried about.
[05:30]Travel, Lodging, and Food The average cost in 2016 of a domestic roundtrip flight in the U.S. according to airlines.org was $366. And one thing you have to take into account with flying for interview is that you may get an interview at a school that's a week from now. And you have to travel to all of them."When it's interview season, you may not be afforded that option of buying way in advance."The average for hotel cost (in 2014) is $140. Let's round that up to $150 for an average hotel night. Assuming you're going to stay for two nights. You don't want to rush out of the interview. You want to be there the night before. Maybe, too, there's pre-interview stuff going on the day before. And you don't want to rush out of the interview to catch a flight. So stay the extra night and fly out the next day.
That's $300 for two hotel nights plus the $366 fare - total of $666.
Adding some food expenses, let's say $45 per day for two days. That's $90 and let's round it up to $100 for meals. Now, you're looking at $750 for hotel, flight, and food when you're traveling. This is just for one interview.
Assuming you get three interviews, that's $750 x 3 = $2,250. Plus the $4,600 you're already spent for the applications. That's excluding travel cost when you're renting a car
And say you need a new suit which is another $150-$200. Now you're in the range of around $8,000 assuming you apply to all 30 schools, you submit all 30 secondaries (where the bulk of the money comes from), plus all the other expenses.
[09:56]Who Collects the Application Fees It's a lot of money and it's something that students will be concerned about and so they don't apply to as many schools.
The initial application is not that much but the secondaries are what hurt you. And if you know the behind of the scenes of the application game, there's an application service that runs these applications. The service gets all of those...

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