Required Information
You must provide details for each experience. Include the date of the experience, hours per week, a contact, the location, and a description of the experience.
Prioritize Your Information
Medical schools are interested in the quality of your experiences. Enter only significant experiences, even if you don’t fill all 15 slots. What kinds of experiences were really important to you? At the same time you must balance brevity with description. Medical schools can’t interview everyone. The qualitative information that you provide is important in making decisions about your application.
Tips for Writing the Work/Activities Section of the AMCAS
Identify only high school activities that illustrate the continuity of your activity during college.
- In describing your experience, keep it brief. Use resume style brief writing. Mention your duties, responsibilities, and anything special that you did.
- If the organization in which you participated is not well known, give a brief description followed by the role you played there.
- If you made Dean's list for more than one semester, only list it once. List the semesters in the description area.
- If you received any scholarship, fellowship, or honor that is not nationally known, describe it briefly. Don’t list awards that are not competitive.
- If you were just a member of an organization, let us know how many meetings/week you attended and why you joined. In other words, how is it meaningful and worthy of its place here?
- If you list a publication, cite it properly. If the paper is not yet published, list it as “in press” (accepted and simply not yet published), “under review” (submitted for review, not published), or “in preparation” (just being prepared, not submitted, and not published).
Be Prepared
Remember that everything you list is fair game should you interview. That means that an admissions committee can ask you anything about the experiences you list. Be sure that you are comfortable discussing each. Don't include an experience on which you feel you can't elaborate.
Choose the Most Meaningful
You have the option of choosing up to three experiences that you consider to be the most meaningful. If you identify three "most meaningful" experiences, you must choose the most meaningful of the three and will have an additional 1325 characters to explain why it is meaningful.
Other Practical Info
- A maximum of fifteen (15) experiences may be entered.
- Enter each experience only once.
- Work and activities will appear on your application in chronological order and cannot be rearranged.
- If you plan to cut and paste your experience description into the application, you should draft your information in a text editor to remove all formatting. Copying formatted text into the application may result in formatting issues that cannot be edited once your application is submitted.
