Should You Keep Your IMAT Prep a Secret?

There's no universal right answer. Whether to tell people you're taking the IMAT should depend on how your specific circle has handled your past goals, not on a general rule. If people around you tend to turn a goal into pressure, constant check-ins, or unsolicited opinions, saying less can genuinely help your prep. If they tend to offer real support without making it about them, telling them is usually worth it.

I get asked some version of this a lot, usually from candidates who already know the answer for their own situation and just want permission to act on it. So here's the actual reasoning, not a blanket rule.

Why some candidates go quiet about it on purpose

The complaints are consistent. People with no context on the exam offer confident opinions anyway, "why not just apply to a normal university," as if the decision hadn't already been thought through. Well-meaning relatives ask "how's studying going" often enough that it starts to feel like a performance review instead of a question. And there's the quieter fear underneath both of those: having to explain a disappointing result to an audience that was never asked to be one, on top of actually dealing with the result itself.

What you actually lose by telling nobody

Going fully silent has a real cost too, and it's worth naming before you default to it. Nobody is there to notice if you're sliding into burnout. Nobody can offer the kind of logistical or emotional support that only works once someone knows what's actually going on. And it can tip into the specific kind of isolation that comes from being the only person in your circle doing something nobody else understands, which is its own weight on top of the exam itself.

The middle path that works for most people

The real choice usually isn't "tell everyone" versus "tell no one." It's picking a small, deliberate circle instead of letting the information spread by default. Tell the two or three people who've actually been useful during past stressful stretches, and be specific about what kind of support helps, something like "ask if I want to talk, don't ask for my mock score," rather than leaving them to guess. That one sentence does more work than most people expect, and it heads off a lot of the check-ins that turn into pressure.

When staying quiet is the right call, not avoidance

If your circle has a real track record of turning your goals into something to weigh in on, going quiet until you have a result worth sharing is a legitimate strategy, not something to feel guilty about. There's no deadline on when people find out. Plenty of candidates say nothing until they're holding an offer, and the reaction at that point is almost always better than it would have been during the uncertain middle of prep, when there was nothing to share but updates for people to react to.

However you land on this, decide it on purpose. The problem was never telling people, it's letting the decision happen by default and then absorbing whatever reaction shows up.