VMCAS, I hate you

So VMCAS opens in a week for next year's cycle - which means it's just about application time. The good news is there exists this nice and convenient place to fill out a single primary application for many of the vet schools out there. The bad news is that place is VMCAS. Obviously, from the title of this post, I had some issues with VMCAS. That might just be me though. There is also the possibility that a lot of the issues I had have been changed/fixed since last year. My main issue with VMCAS was that it was set up to be way more tedious than it needed to be. I'll explain in a second but first let me just talk about the application in general.

The first thing you need to do is designate/set up your Evaluators section. You want to make sure to give your evaluators plenty of time. The second thing you need to do is start on your personal statement, if you have not already. I won't lie - I didn't start my personal statement until July but in my opinion the sooner you start, the better. I don't think you actually need the full four months to write your personal statement. I just suggest starting right away because you'll need good amount of time between drafts/rewrites to just forget about it for a while before you go back and read over it again. Write a draft. Read through it and edit it yourself. Send it to anyone you know who will be honest and give you good input on it. Take their comments into consideration and edit it accordingly. Continue to do all this until you think you have your final draft. Then - take a month break. Forget about it and work on other parts of your application. After a month, come back to your draft and go through all the steps again. Continue this until you run out of time. I had six "official drafts" for my personal statement and I only saved it as a new "draft" if there were drastic differences between my current draft and the previous one. I compared my original draft and my final draft after all was said and done, and you wouldn't believe how much it changed. After comparing them, it was hard to believe that for a short period of time I was happy with my original draft.

As for the rest of the application on VMCAS, I would fill out the basics of the basics first. This includes: address in formation, personal data, background information, high school, previous professional & undergraduate enrollments, institutions attended, tests, and other/previous applications. I don't remember having any issues with any of those sections. I think they were pretty straight forward. The first section where I ran into a problem was the "Parent/Guardian" section and that is mainly because it asked for information that not even my parents knew the answers to, like the exact date that my father and the exact date that my mother became residents of Florida.

The other two sections I left out from above are the "Experiences" section and the "Coursework" one. These two sections are an example of what I meant earlier when I said the application was set up to be way more tedious than it needs to be. The reason for that in the Experiences section is that they want you to list everything in order from most recent to oldest. This wouldn't be an issue except that it is set up so that you can not edit the order you enter them in. So if you forget something or if you get a new job between when you start filling out this section and when the application is due then you need to start all over since that new job would now be the "most recent" and would have to be entered in first. Hopefully they changed this set up for this cycle of applications. As for the Coursework section - I just found the method required for entering the information to be very annoying. If they haven't changed it, I think you'll soon agree. Nonetheless, it's very simple - just tedious.

Despite my issues with some of the ways VMCAS is set up, I couldn't be more thankful for the convenience of the service. Sorry for the sudden end to this post (it's getting kind of long anyway). If anyone is interested, I can have at least one more post about the application since I'm sure there many things I forgot to talk about in this one.