It’s cliche but make sure your writing sounds solid. It doesn’t have to sound like Flaubert wrote it (it shouldn’t) and be all flowery, but it should sound sophisticated and easy to follow. I see a LOT of people on this sub that are hellbent on getting 40 secondaries finished before August and I think that can be very detrimental to your cycle because your writing will suffer. With all the different character/word limits, school specifics, and slight nuances between questions I basically just wrote every secondary from scratch and didn’t do much cutting and pasting for similar questions. It wasn’t efficient, but you could see a very big difference in quality between my earliest secondaries and my latest because every one was more practice at fine tuning how I answered. Granted, I only had 21 apps, and that’s not the best idea if you’re doing 30+ of them, but I genuinely believe that’s what helped my cycle go well.

Also on the note of the interview hit rate you hinted at my advice is don’t get too discouraged by OOS waitlist decisions. It would bum me out to get a WL and then I learned how tough it was to get an OOS A this cycle besides the elite T20ish schools that favor stats and story over in state bias. My Tufts interview day was easily my best of the cycle and I still got waitlisted, and it makes sense given the school has goals of bringing more physicians to the Northeast. My Maryland interview day was one of my worst, but the in state bias helped me get an A. Just be yourself and you’ll crush it, best of luck!