Health Advising Professions Office

The Committee Letter and Credentials Service

Priority Deadline*: June 1, 2009
Deadline:  August 3, 2009

The University of Maryland Reed-Yorke Health Professions Advising Office (HPAO) offers a credentials service to individuals who aspire to attend a Health Professions School. There are two components to the service:

1. COMMITTEE LETTER


2. CREDENTIALS FORWARDING SERVICE

Committee Letter

What is the Credentials Forwarding Service?

The HPAO forwards the committee letter, for those who have requested and were eligible to receive one, and/or individual letters of recommendation from faculty, staff, and mentors, to professional schools upon request.

What is the Committee Letter?

The Committee Letter is a form of evaluation used by the HPAO to assess individuals who are only applying to Medical, Dental, Optometry, or Podiatry school.  Eligible students are: currently enrolled students, UMD alumni, and Science in the Evening Program or Post-Baccalaureate students with a minimum of 16 credits of completed UMD course work. Transfer students to the University of Maryland must also have the minimum of 16 credits before being eligible to utilize the Committee Letter process.    The Committee Letter reflects on the following:

  • Academic information
  • Family and basic biographical information
  • Exposure to health care, patients and the clinical setting
  • Community service
  • Research
  • Work experience
  • Challenges and personal responsibility
  • Personal passions, talents, skills

The UMD committee letter is drafted as a result of interactions with the HPAO advisors, information collected in the Student Information Inventory, and a mock interview.  The Committee Letter incorporates all of these elements and introduces the Turtle (explanations of special programs, rigor of courses and load, etc.) This letter will accompany your submitted individual Letters of Recommendation to the professional schools.  Receiving a Committee Letter neither means that you will gain admission to medical or dental school, nor conversely, if you do not utilize this service, that you will not get in. Many schools, however, do expect students to have a Committee Letter if such a service is available on their campus.  Plan ahead and be aware of the deadlines!  No exceptions will be made to the Pre-Health packet deadlines.  Expect the process to take up to 8-10 weeks from the time you submit your completed packet.

Students mailing the Pre-Health Packet, especially close to the deadline, should request a return receipt from the post office.  Only official documentation such as this will be accepted as proof that a packet was mailed by the deadline, should it be lost in transit.

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What is a complete application?

Refer to the Student Information Inventory Checklist as well.  A complete application includes:

- Student Information Inventory
- Resume
- Minimum of two letters of recommendation
- Appropriate fee

Our packet must be complete; the Committee will neither accept nor review incomplete packets, and packets that remain incomplete at the August 3 deadline will not be eligible for the commitee process.

*Completed applications received by the priority deadline are guaranteed a committee letter by August 1, provided that the applicant has met the interview criteria in order to interview in a timely way and the following conditions are met:

-MCAT taken by the June test date; DAT or OAT taken by July 15;
-A minimum of two letters are received by June 1 and ALL letters of recommendation are received by July 24th;
-AMCAS, AACOMAS, OPTOMCAS or AADSAS application has been submitted and fully processed by July 24. 

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How do I request a committee letter?

The first step in requesting a committee letter is completing the Pre-Health Packet, which can be found on our website after February 1.  The deadline to submit this is August 3.  Once this has been submitted, an advisor will review it, make sure you have at least two letters of recommendation on file, provide you with some feedback by email about your application and list of schools, and invite you to schedule an interview.  You must wait to receive the advisor e-mail before you may set up an interview.  After that, interviews with committee members will be offered in the following manner:
 
March 1- June 1 – priority applicants: Priority applicants who meet the June 1 priority deadline with a complete application will be guaranteed a committee letter by August 1, provided they have met the conditions outlined above.
 
June 2 – August 30: Interviews will be arranged with candidates based on their availability, the availability of the Pre-Med Committee members and the timeliness of the submission of the Pre-Health Packet. No interviews will be scheduled until you have at least two letters of recommendation in your file. Students who meet the priority deadline will continue to have priority in the interview and letter completion process.  Applicants should expect it to take 8-10 weeks from the date they submit their complete application before a committee letter is produced .  Remember, the Pre-health Packet deadline is AUGUST 3 –no exceptions.  All applicants must schedule their interview by August 30, though the interview may take place after that.
 
Once the interview is completed, the interviewer will forward his/her notes to the HPAO.  Priority letters will be drafted, but may not be finalized until spring grades are in, test scores are received, all letters of recommendation are in and the common application has been fully processed.

Do I need to have taken the MCAT/DAT/OAT in order to submit the Student Information Inventory?

No.  Please indicate the date you are planning to take it within the form.

 

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CREDENTIALS FORWARDING SERVICE

When will the HPAO begin forwarding letters to professional schools?

No letters will be forwarded from HPAO until mid to late July at the earliest.  Schools do not need letters before this time and many services are not set up to receive them electronically until this time.  August 1 is the promised Committee letter date for priority applicants

When do I request that HPAO transmit letters to schools? 

After you submit your primary application to the appropriate application service (AMCAS, AADSAS, etc), they will verify your application and then transmit it to your designated schools.  At that point, you will begin to receive requests from schools to complete their secondary/supplemental application. (In some cases, the secondaries are actually available from the school’s website at any time; in other cases, schools may send secondaries to a screened applicant pool only).

As you complete secondaries and only after all of your individual letters of recommendation are in, submit the Credentials Mailing Form to the HPAO. Your committee letter, along with your other letters of recommendation, will be sent to your schools via one of the following services:

  • VirtualEvals (most medical, osteopathic medical and podiatry schools)
  • AADSAS (dental schools)
  • OPTOMCAS (optometry schools starting with fall 2010 applicants)

IMPORTANT: Without the Credentials Mailing form, your letters will not be forwarded to any schools.

Please note that the HPAO will send the same file of Letters of Evaluation to each of the schools to which you apply.  We cannot customize each file for specific schools. Moreover, it is not necessary to do so, since every medical school has been fully satisfied with the format of our Credentials Packet.  It is not necessary to comply with a school’s request for a specific number or distribution of letters when you use the HPAO credentials service.

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What is the AMCAS Letter Service? What do I need to do for these schools?

The HPAO forwards letters of recommendation in conjunction with Virtual Evals (VE), which operates an electronic letter of recommendation process, whereby we send your complete credentials packet, comprised of your committee letter and individual letters of recommendation to VE and VE forwards them electronically to your designated medical schools.

AMCAS also runs a letter service with participating medical schools (see AMCAS webpage for complete list of schools).

Because we already use an electronic service (VE), there will be very minor input needed for students utilizing the HPAO Credentials Service.  Please read and follow these instructions:

1.  Within the AMCAS application, you will be asked whether your letter is a committee letter, letter packet or individual letter.  You should select “Committee Letter”. You will be asked to provide the name and contact information for the recommender.  You will enter:

Wendy Loughlin
Then, fill in the additional required institutional information.  Use our letterhead address information, which can be found on our homepage: prehealth.umd.edu

2. For the requested email address, use:
premed@umd.edu

This is a special e-mail account we have established specifically for this purpose.  Please do not use this e-mail for other correspondence to our office.  The only thing you will send to this email address is the Letter ID Form as an attachment(see item 3).

3. You will be given a unique Letter ID for your committee letter. You will need to forward the Letter Request Form, printable from AMCAS, to HPAO as an attachment to premed@umd.edu.  We MUST have the form with the unique Letter ID in order to proceed with forwarding your credentials file to VE and on to AMCAS and the schools.

4. Our internal Credentials Mailing Form is still required for every school you plan to apply to, whether they participate in the AMCAS letter service or not.  This form can be found here and must be dropped off, mailed or faxed to our office (no emails of this form, please): http://www.prehealth.umd.edu/2010 Forms.html

5.  Please be sure, when you are registering for the MCAT or filling out your AMCAS, to release your information to your prehealth advisor. 

6.  If you are not requesting or not eligible to receive a committee letter and you are utilizing the Credentials Only process, instead of indicating “Committee Letter”, as instructed in item 1, you will enter “Letter Packet”.  All other information remains the same.

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What if I am applying to schools that use TMDSAS?

TMDSAS is a bit different.  They don’t use a secondary application process. Rather, at the time you submit your TMDSAS application, you can go ahead and request that we transmit your letters (if all of your individual letters of recommendation have been received and your MCAT score is in).  Remember that your committee letter will be completed based on the plan outlined above. Please inform the HPAO of your TMDSAS ID number.
 
Is the process different for DO schools?
No.  The process is essentially the same.  However, many osteopathic schools require that applicants have a letter from an osteopathic physician. You should arrange to have a letter from an osteopathic physician you have shadowed or with whom you have discussed osteopathic medicine sent to supplement the file of letters we post for osteopathic schools.  If you decide midway through the application process to add DO schools to your allopathic application, we require the following:

• that you provide us with a statement as to why this type of program is right for you so we can address that when we convert your committee letter to DO
• an additional $20 processing fee
• your AACOMAS ID number

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Is the process any different for dental schools?
 
The HPAO forwards your letters of recommendation in conjunction with AADSAS, which operates an electronic letter of recommendation process, whereby AADSAS will collect letters of recommendation from us and forward them directly to schools on the applicant’s behalf.  HPAO still requires Credentials Mailing Form that lists all of the dental schools to which you are planning to apply.
 
Within the AADSAS application, you will be asked whether your letter is a committee letter.  You should indicate “yes” for this.  You will be asked to provide the name and e-mail of the recommender.  You will enter:
 
Wendy Loughlin
dentalapp@umd.edu
 
This is a special e-mail account we have established specifically for this purpose.  Please do not use this e-mail for other correspondence to our office. It will not be answered.
 
At this point, the credentials file that you have established in the HPAO will be requested by AADSAS. Your entire committee packet, including our Committee Letter and however many additional letters you have in your file, whether it be one or six, will be considered the equivalent of three (3) letters of recommendation by AADSAS.  AADSAS will allow you to add only one additional letter of recommendation to this set if, for example, you receive a late letter from a summer internship that you wish to add.
 
A couple of other points:
 
1.  Please be sure, when you are taking the DAT, to release your DAT scores to our office. It makes it very hard for us to finalize your letters if you do not give us access to this information. Please also send us a breakdown of your scores by email to Wendy or preprof@deans.umd.edu as the ADA only forwards scores to us on a quarterly basis.
 
2.  It is your responsibility to view the supplemental application requirements for EACH dental school to which you plan to apply. They require different information at different points in the process. You can link to the requirements for each school from the AADSAS application.
 
3.  While AADSAS and individual dental schools may state that a committee letter is all that is needed if you have a committee letter process at your school, the HPAO still wants you to follow our suggested guidelines regarding letters of recommendation, i.e. two science letters and a letter from a practicing dentist if possible at a minimum. Our committee letter is not a compilation of your other letters, as is the practice at many other schools. Thus, we forward your additional letters of recommendation in their entirety.
 
4.  AADSAS forwards your letters to your designated schools in both electronic and paper format.  The electronic forward is very quick, but all receiving schools do not access the letters in this way (their choice).  For the receiving schools that still wait for the paper version, they may receive your letters up to 3 weeks after the electronic transfer takes place. 

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When will my committee letter be sent?

Timing of Letters: We will attempt to transmit your letters within three weeks of the time we receive your first Credentials Mailing Form.  However, due to the large number of applicants and the amount of time it takes to write an individualized health professions advisor’s letter for each of the approximately 350 applicants, we will periodically have a backlog of letters to prepare.  At those peak times, it may take as many as 8-10 weeks to write and transmit your letters from the point at which you submit a completed Pre-Health Packet.  Schools realize that each committee letter takes time and that great attention is given to each letter, and they appreciate that fact.  However, you can assist in the process by making sure your letters from evaluators have been submitted by the June 1 deadline, filing your Pre-Health Packet in a timely fashion (the June 1 priority deadline is your best bet), and returning your secondary applications promptly.  When completing secondary applications, indicate where requested that your letters will be from a premedical advisor or “committee.” If the specific pre-medical advisor name is requested, list Wendy Loughlin.
 
Is the process different for re-applicants?

Re-applicants: Much of the above process is the same, with the exception being that interviews are not required or available.  Thus, to request an updated committee letter, fill out the Pre-Health Packet for re-applicants, which can be found on our website after February 1.  The deadline to submit this is August 3rd.  Once this has been submitted, Nick Celedón, who works with all re-applicants, will review it, make sure you have at least two letters of recommendation on file, provide you with feedback about your application and list of schools, and complete your updated letter.  Nick may contact you throughout the process to clarify more recent activities in which you have been involved.

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Is the process any different for Science in the Evening Students?

The committee process for Science in the Evening students works in exactly the same way.  Students wishing to utilize the HPAO Committee must submit the Pre-Health Packet and follow all of the same deadlines and instructions as all other students.  In order to utilize the Committee, SIE students must have earned 16 credits at UMD. 

Once an HPAO advisor has completed the review of the Student Information Inventory, the SIE student will be invited, by e-mail, to set up a mock interview with Dr. Joelle Presson through Linda Dalo.  Dr. Presson sends some supplemental questions for SIE students to respond to prior to their interview. 

Can I add additional letters of recommendation to my packet?

Letters from summer 2009 experiences: Many of you will be participating in an activity this summer from which you would like to have a letter of recommendation.  If we have not already posted your credentials file to your schools, it is not a problem to add additional letters.  In general, however, it is preferred by the schools that all of your letters be forwarded at once so as to cut down on the paper flow at their end.  We cannot add letters electronically once an initial electronic transfer has been done.
 
When is the last date to add an additional letter to my packet?

September 30, 2009.

Can I use the credentials service if I do not go through the committee process?

Yes.  If you do not wish to use the committee process, miss the deadline for requesting the committee letter or are not eligible for the committee letter you may still request that we collect your letters and send them as a complete packet to professional schools.  Be aware that this service is available for professional health programs only.  We will not forward letters to prospective employers, other graduate programs or any other recipients. In order to do this, please work directly with Mike Grünberg: mgrunber@umd.edu and submit the following:

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Updated February 10, 2009