📥Guidebook (Embed) – futuremd.org

User Guidebook

1. Using the Framework

Navigating the Framework

Sidebar(s)
We recommend using the sidebar we created on the right side of the page. It gives the the clearest picture of the Framework’s structure.
Additionally, Notion provides a navigation panel on the left side as well. However, due to how Notion’s sidebars work, every link mentioned on each page is listed in the sidebar; you can see how this can quickly get confusing.
Top Breadcrumbs
All pages have a breadcrumb navigation on top to help orient yourself:
Bottom Footer
Most pages have a footer section at the bottom with easy access to your main framework pages.

The Four Main Pages

The following four pages are essentially the four main dashboards or views, each offering a different real-time snapshot of your secondary application process

1. My Progress

This page gives you a clear idea of your overall secondary application progress. You can view your progress across all your schools by percentage, or view your progress by individual schools and completed essay prompts. The 3 views available on that page are:

Table: Schools (ordered by rank)
Table: Schools (ordered by due date)
Calendar

2. My Schools

This page gives you a comprehensive view of every school you’re applying to. To start, we’ve already researched and provided each school’s main attributes: Mission/Vision Statement, Values, Teaching Hospital, and a few Distinctives (programs, key facilities, unique curriculums, etc.) to help you tailor your responses.

However, we encourage you to add additional key information relevant to your narrative or personal brand— including prominent faculty, recent research publications, statistics, geographic factors, programs of particular interest—to each school’s “profile page”. Then, when you work on your essays, depending on the school that particular prompt belongs to, the framework will display that school’s information so you can keep it in view and tailor your essays.

The default view is a visual gallery layout, but the 3 other table views let you quickly view all your schools Attributes, Location & Hospital, and Website.

3. My Notes

This page is the section of the framework where you can add, organize, and update all your notes or outlines for each of the 10 Main Themes and 37 SubThemes (read our rationale for all themes here). Each Theme or SubTheme has its own section for your notes.

Conveniently, next to each theme section is a table containing every prompt given that particular theme label. This will allow you not only to stay organized, but allow you to efficiently tackle similar prompts, across every school, in one session

4. My Prompts

This page gives you a comprehensive view of every essay prompt you need to write, grouped by school. While similar to the Track by Prompt Table in My Progress, it offers additional details such as Word/Character count and whether they’re optional or conditional. It also displays each prompt’s Main Theme or SubTheme so you can view the themes valued by each school.

2. Writing Your Secondaries

Writing in the Framework

One primary purpose of the Secondary Framework is centralizing and displaying all information relevant to the specific prompt you’re actively working on. This includes both

Relevant school information (values, distinctives, etc.)
Relevant prompt information (word count, theme or subtheme, etc.).

That’s why on each prompt page, you’ll be able to see exactly that—and right on the page you’re working on. This information is located on the top section of each prompt page.

Moreover, you’ll see that each prompt page has a “Theme Notes” section, the right of the “My Response” section. If you’ve properly synced the Region themes with the Master theme during the setup, then the sidebar will display all your Theme & SubTheme notes you add in the My Themes page, allowing you to pull in any theme notes related to the prompt at hand.

Please note that unlike the school and prompt information, we don’t provide any additional information for the themes apart from the initial categorization.

Backing Up Your Work

Notion stores your data securely on the cloud (via Amazon’s Web Services), but it’s always better to be safe. Admittedly, the options for backing your data up aren’t the smoothest. While we’ve been pestering Notion to offer better backup or sync options, the current options are as follows:

Export Notion Data to HTML/Markdown/CSV
1. Go to Settings & Members at the top of your left-hand sidebar. Select Settings in the sidebar of that window.
2. Scroll down and click the Export all workspace content button.
3. You’ll receive an email from Notion with a link to download your file(s). The link will expire after 7 days.
Creating & Connecting a Copy on a Cloud Service
1. Since Notion doesn’t yet offer an automatic sync, a more rudimentary method is to manually create a master document using either Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or Box.
2. After creating a copy in your Cloud service, you can link and integrate it on each Essay Prompt Page by typing / (forward slash) Google Drive. (or, One Drive, Dropbox, or Box).

3. Updating Essay Prompts (2023-2024 Cycle)

The Current Prompts In The Framework

As of the framework release, most secondary essay prompts that’ve been categorized and included in your framework download are from the ’22-’23 cycle. This will be indicated by the “Prompts Cycle” Property, visible on each school and prompt page.

See an Example Image

Why Are Most Prompts From '22-'23?

This is due to the fact that this tool was initially imagined as a “Secondary Pre-Writer”, slated for release in June. Unfortunately, choosing to develop the framework on Notion came with a learning curve that caused some unexpected delays.

Many schools have already sent their secondary applications, so there may be some outdated prompts in the framework. We’ve started updating them and you can keep track via our Prompt Tracker (2024).

Important With how Notion works, you’re running your own copy of the Framework. Unfortunately, this means that any updates we make to the Secondary Framework will not automatically be reflected in your copy of the framework. See below for how to ensure you have the latest prompts.

How to Update Prompts

Manually Update (2 ways)

1. DUPLICATING INDIVIDUAL PROMPTS

The most straightforward way to quickly add a new prompt you’ve received is by duplicating an existing prompt from your “My Prompts” page.

First, find the specific school for which you’d like to add a prompt to. (This ensures that the image banners stay consistent between School and its prompts for ease of use)

For example, to add a new prompt to UFCOM’s page, hover over one of its prompts and click the 6 Dots Menu on the left of the row. row will open up a menu that allows you to duplicate (Ctrl+D) the prompt.

After a giving it a few seconds to load, Notion should add an identical prompt in another row as a sub-item to the original parent school.

It’s important to note that all prompts should exist as sub-items to a School to properly link them and properly utilize all the table’s view filters we’ve set up.

Finally, open the duplicated prompt page itself and make any necessary changes including the prompt’s title (one line summary), word count, theme, etc.

Note: While you can now delete any outdated prompts, we suggest moving old prompts (ctrl+shift+P) to the “My Archived Prompts” page; sometimes referencing old prompts can be helpful in deciphering what schools are really asking for in a new prompt. (i.e. they didn’t answer the prompt like we expected last cycle, so let’s word it this way)

2. USING THE "ADD NEW PROMPT" PAGE

During initial testing, there were times duplicating (Ctrl+D) a prompt row appeared to do nothing. (We’ve reached out to Notion support).

One solution would simply be to create a new sub-item (see previous picture: you’ll see that option in gray, below the prompts). But this would create a blank prompt page without the corresponding school-colored page cover each secondary prompt currently has.

So, in case the first method doesn’t work, we made an easy way for you to add new prompts that keeps the school colored banners.

From the nav sidebar, go to Update Prompts > Add New Prompt.

On that page, you’ll find simple instructions on how to use the existing school templates listed there to add new prompts and move them into your framework (i.e. moving new sub-items into parent school pages).

Import Updates

1. USING THE "IMPORT NEW PROMPTS" PAGE

As we’ve mentioned above, we’ll also be regularly updating the secondaries as they’re made available on our Prompt Tracker (2024).

If the tracker indicates that we’ve updated a school’s prompts after your initial Framework download/setup, you can use this method to add these updated prompts (with updated themes, word counts, due dates, etc.) to your framework, instead of manually updating each one at a time.

The process will be similar to step 4 of the initial framework setup when you duplicated the 5 region add-ons into your Notion workspace.

Step 1: From the Prompt Tracker (2024), using the links on the page’s right sidebar, open the Region Add-on

Step 2: Duplicate the Region Add-on page

Step 3: Locate the Region Add-on in your workspace (you can find it on Notion’s left sidebar)

Step 4: Click on the Region’s Prompt Updates Page and follow the 4 steps on that page to easily move any new school prompts into your framework.

Step 5: Go to Update Prompts > Import New Prompts where you’ll see 2 tables: Table Hailey & Table Justin. Updated prompts should now be seen in Table Hailey: Select all new prompts (not the school name) and drag them into the corresponding school in your framework via Table Justin.

Next Steps

Cool beans, you now know the basics of the framework.

As we may have already mentioned, this is our first cycle launching the framework, so we’d be grateful for both your patience and your feedback, whether you notice broken links or feel certain parts of the framework feel unintuitive: ranging from awkward to rage-inducing.

We will soon be adding more to this Guidebook and to the FAQ, which you should check out next.

P.S. – Wondering why we can update this page, but not the prompts in your framework? The reason: though you’re reading this page from your Notion Workspace, it’s actually just an embedded window of a page on our website SecondaryFramework.com/guidebook. However, we sadly parted ways with the rest of your framework pages when they were downloaded to your Notion workspace, where we no longer have access to make changes (which also means your notes are private only to you!) Hope this clears things up!