Pre-Health Professions AMCAS and Evaluation Letters

(Choose Committee Letter) see below

From the AMCAS help files

These are your options in the application:

Committee Letter: A committee letter is a letter authored by a pre-health committee or pre-health advisor and intended to represent your institution’s evaluation of you. A committee letter may or may not include additional letters written in support of your application.

Letter Packet: A packet or set of letters assembled and distributed by your institution, often by the institutions career center. A Letter Packet may include a cover sheet from your pre-health committee or advisor; however, in contrast to a Committee Letter, a Letter Packet does not include an evaluative letter from your pre-health committee or advisor.

Individual Letter: An individual letter refers to a letter authored by, and representing, a single letter writer. If you have already included an individual letter within either a committee letter or a letter packet, you should not add a separate entry for the individual letter.

"If a committee letter or letter packet for you is being sent to AMCAS, the entire committee letter or letter packet will be sent to the schools you've designated to receive this letter. AMCAS will not remove a letter from your packet once it has been received. Therefore, if you wish to send a letter specifically to one medical school, you should enter this as an individual letter and have it sent separately from the packet."

Please choose the first option, Committee letter and put me (Dr. Kristi Cantrell) as the contact person. Do not include your other members of the committee. You will receive ONE letter ID, which you should forward to me right away. I need to include this in your packet that I send in.

Some of you may want to add additional letters from health professionals or personal references. You may still do this and you can direct the letter to specific schools on the AMCAS letter list. If you plan on sending the same set of letters to all the schools, I recommend having them all sent to me. I can put them into the letters packet as additional letters.

I use the AMCAS Letter Writer Application to submit the letters packet and this is immediately available to the schools that you choose. I will work on your composite/evaluative letter after I have received all of the evaluations from your committee members, all of the other items I need (Declaration form, Committee Form, Westmont transcript, AMCAS) and you tell me that you have begun to complete secondaries. It may take a few weeks to complete your packet after all of these items are done. You will continue to receive notices from AMCAS that your evaluation letter has not been submitted. Do not worry about this until all of the above items are completed plus two to three weeks.

When are these normally submitted to AMCAS - Medical Schools?

LOEs (letters of evaluation) are normally submitted at the time when you are submitting your secondary applications to the individual medical schools. They will request them at that time. I will attempt to get your LOE packet sent in once you inform me that you are submitting secondary applications.

Note: AMCAS will be sending a weekly notice that your letter from me has not yet been submitted. In most cases, I will wait until you are submitting your secondary applications. Just let me know when this occurs, and I will get the letter packet in as soon as possible. Of course, this assumes that your letter writers have submitted their letters to me by this time. Please check CANVAS to see if all of your letters are in.