How To Apply
Recommendations
To health professional schools, the most important recommendation is your Biomedical Professions Committee evaluation. All medical and dental schools prefer the committee letter to a packet of individual letters. An NAU composite committee evaluation is the result of your interviews with three NAU faculty in the spring of your junior year or occasionally the fall of your senior year. In order to be interviewed by the Biomedical Professions Committee, you must be an NAU student or alumnae, and you must register with the Office of Biomedical Professions located in the Gateway Student Success Center (building 43).
During a meeting with Monica Bai, Coordinator of the Office of Biomedical Professions, you will choose the three faculty members of your committee, one of whom will be your faculty advisor. You then contact each faculty for an individual interview. The interviewers will ask questions about your background, your academic record and your clinical experience in an effort to determine your motivation and preparation for medical (or other) school. You may be asked questions about medical ethics, national health care, or HMOs. Your interviewers are asking themselves: Would I go to this person for my doctor (dentist, optometrist, ...)? The two faculty send their comments to your advisor, who will write a composite evaluation and will forward this committee letter to the Office of Biomedical Professions for your file.
You may solicit additional individual letters of recommendation, but these are not required, and should be requested only if you feel someone can add materially to your application. A letter from a nurse with whom you work, or from a physician with whom you served a preceptorship or internship, for example, would be important. If you are performing research, a letter from your research professor is also useful. Do not solicit character references from your neighbor who is a doctor; do not ask your boss at Pizza Hut for a recommendation.
One or two of these additional letters is ideal and three is the maximum schools will want to see. Start in the spring or summer before you apply. Pick up the Instructions for Writing a Recommendation Letter in the Office of Biomedical Professions and give these to your recommenders. Several weeks later, check with the Office to see that these have arrived. It is your responsibility to see that they do and to remind the recommender. Don't wait until you are ready to send recommendations to schools to discover that one of your letters, requested five months ago, never arrived. Please do not request recommendations to be sent until you verify all letters that you want sent are in your file.
When the schools ask you to send your recommendation file, please request this via the internet only.
Click on the 2007 Applicant Login button on the Biomedical Professions webpage.
Enter your last name and last 4 digits of your Student ID Number.
Click on the Request Letter button in the top left hand corner.
There will be a drop down menu for all schools with their addresses.
Please verify the address of the school and e-mail us if we need to make a change. You may make as many requests as needed, but will need to do this one school at a time.
We send all letters of recommendation in your file unless you have made special arrangements with Monica Bai.
In almost all circumstances, your packet will be sent to the school(s) within one week. You will be notified via e-mail when they are sent.
Follow these links for more information on applying:
To the Biomedical Professions Committee Members:
Instructions for Writing Committee Evaluations
Sample Interview QuestionsTo Individual Recommendation Letter Writers:
Instructions for Writing Individual Letters of Recommendation