As a medical school applicant you may be bewildered by the American Medical College Application Service or AMCAS work and activities section which is a very important part of your primary application and should complement your medical school personal statement .
You may not be sure what to write, whether to use bullets or narratives, and how much detail to go into. You are probably looking to AMCAS activities section Reddit or r/premed on Reddit for insight.
We consider AMCAS work and activities descriptions to be one of the most important parts of your application and can benefit applicants during holistic review.
At MedEdits, we have worked with hundreds of successful applicants and therefore know what approaches yield the best results. Follow our proven approach to impress application reviewers and earn more medical school interviews.
AMCAS work & activities entries give you the chance to let medical schools know how much you’ve accomplished during your premed years so admissions committees understand who you are beyond your MCAT and GPA .
This section of the AMCAS application offers the opportunity to write about up to 15 activity descriptions that are up to 700 characters in length. You can then select three of those activities as most meaningful activities which gives you an additional 1325 characters to elaborate on the activity.
We encourage you to use this space to your advantage, elaborating as much as possible about your roles, responsibilities, the insights you gained, as well as what you have learned from the experience. You should also write in detail about the impact or “difference” you have made through the experience.
Med schools place great emphasis on evaluating candidates’ based on the AAMC core competencies and I can tell you from experience that applicants who write fully about the experiences that had the greatest influence on them and their path to medicine have an advantage in the application process.
Reviewers are looking for compelling evidence that you are worthy of an interview invitation, and activities descriptions, especially for an applicant who doesn’t have “over the top statistics ,” can make or break this decision.
I can tell you from experience that applicants who write fully about the experiences that had the greatest influence on them and their path to medicine have an advantage in the application process.
In fact, a few schools openly state that they now place greater emphasis on the AMCAS work and activities descriptions than on the personal statement. You should devote as much time to composing your experience descriptions as you do to writing your personal statement.
And keep in mind that reviewers typically read your activities descriptions before your personal statement since this is the predetermined order of the application. You want them to read your statement with a “good impression” of who you are based on what they have already read. This “halo effect” will then influence the way they interpret your personal statement, increasing your chances of being invited for a medical school interview .
AMCAS Application Example
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Below are the key AMCAS dates of which you should be aware. Dates for AMCAS 2024-2025 are as follows:
There are 19 AMCAS work and activities categories you can select from and they are listed below.
Oftentimes, a single experience may fit into more than one category type. In this case, we encourage you to select the category that best represents the activity or that might otherwise be lacking in your application. For example, a research experience that you were paid for could be listed as Paid Employment or Research. We would encourage you to list this activity as Research since all medical schools value research experience in applicants.
Do not be concerned if you don’t have an experience for each category. Medical schools would much rather see that students have sought out meaningful and long term experiences in a few areas rather than multiple, superficial experiences in many different areas.
For each experience entry in the AMCAS work and activities section, you will need to complete the following fields, listed below. As with everything in your application, be as honest and accurate as possible.
For each experience, you will need to select the experience type from a drop down menu.
For some experiences, you might merge experiences. For example, if you have listed multiple doctors for short periods of time (1-2 days) you might combine these experiences in to a single entry and simply list each doctor you shadowed and what his or her specialty was. However, if you spent a significant amount of time shadowing a single doctor, you might want to give this experience its own entry.
Write an experience name that is descriptive yet accurately describes the experience. We discourage applicants from getting too creative when writing this description so you don’t mislead or confuse your reviewer.
You will list a start and end date for each experience. AMCAS automatically lists you experiences in chronological order so you do not have control over the order in which experiences are listed. Some experiences such as awards, publications, and presentations will have only one date! If you have not started this experience, please enter the date you are submitting as the start and end dates and enter 0
(zero) in the completed hours field.
If an experience is ongoing or has a future end date, you can enter that end date with the latest date being August of the year you will matriculate.
For each experience you will enter the total hours spent on the activity. If you participated in the activity multiple times for different periods of time, you can enter up to three additional start/end dates and hours spent during each interval as well as the hours for each interval. Approximate the hours worked, which may have varied over the course of your involvement in any given activity. As with everything in your application, be as honest and accurate as possible.
If an activity is ongoing and you aren’t sure of what the total hours will be, do your best to approximate! Medical school admissions committees know that plans change and you may not know exactly how the year will proceed. Be sure to enter anticipated hours in any activity you will be continuing during the application year.
For awards and honors, the system requires you not to enter hours.
Enter an organization name that is most closely associated with the experience.
It is important to enter the location of your experience accurately.
If an experience took place in multiple locations, choose the one that dominated the time spent.
We have never heard of anyone from AMCAS or a medical school actually calling an experience contact, so, list the contact that is most closely related to the activity.
If there wasn’t a clear supervisor or advisor, consider listing the contact for the parent organization or institution. For hobbies or student-led organizations, list yourself as the contact!
Many medical school applicants do not take full advantage of the work & activities entries, and use bullet points to describe their experiences. These students typically do not earn as many medical school interviews. What can you learn from this? Even if you have excellent stats, you must compose compelling and convincing documents to earn medical school interviews. Grades and MCAT scores alone won’t earn you interviews. We also find that some applicants template entries writing about each entry in the exact same way. This will make for fairly boring reading for your reviewer which is not ideal. Never lie or write something that isn’t true and don’t over embellish. If, for example, you worked in a lab and spent your summer only pipetting and entering data in a computer, then say so. But, to enhance the entry, you could also write that this experience provided the foundation for a laboratory experience you had later on in which you did have greater responsibility.
With only 700 characters, you don’t have much room for introspection, but you still can add some insights if you have the space after explaining your activity. What should you include in your experience summary?
If you are applying through both AMCAS and AACOMAS, you can use the same activity descriptions for both application systems however you will need to trim them slightly to 600 characters.
AMCAS Work and Activities Example
Most applicants list between 14-15 entries. As more and more applicants are “non traditional”, applicants have more experiences. We discourage writing about high school experiences unless they were very significant. It is important to list experiences that were important to you and we discourage using any “filler” experiences such as single day volunteer experiences.
ACMAS applicants can select up to three of the 15 entries that they consider their “most meaningful experiences.” You can use up to 1,325 characters (including spaces) to elaborate on why your experiences were meaningful. For each experience, applicants select one of the categories AMCAS specifies.
As you write about these three activities, think not only about what you did during that activity but what it meant to you, what you learned, and how it influenced your path and choices. You should also write about how the meaningful experience influenced your ideals, insights, perspectives, and goals. Medical school admissions committees use your application to evaluate your personal characteristics and the best applications demonstrate passion, enthusiasm, insight, and introspection. Committees also want to be convinced of your commitment to and understanding of the practice of medicine. Your participation in activities should not be superficial, which gives the impression that you take on activities just for the sake of doing so. Particularly for the three experiences you choose to describe more fully, demonstrate that your involvement is deep and that you actually learned something from your participation
Deciding which experiences have been most meaningful to you is entirely personal and depends on several factors. When it comes to experiences, applicants typically fall into one of two categories:
If you are in the first category, it is best to first decide which experiences you will highlight in your personal statement. Ideally, you should then write about your other meaningful experiences as your “most meaningful” experience entries. Applicants who have had fewer meaningful experiences are in a more difficult position. These applicants may be forced to write about the same experiences in both their personal statement and as their “most meaningful” experience entries. They then face the challenge of writing about different aspects of the experience in the two documents and avoiding use of the same turns of phrase.
Ideally, two of your “most meaningful” experiences should be related to medicine, volunteerism/ community service, science, research, clinical experiences, or teaching. It would seem suspect, for example, if your three “most meaningful” entries were about extracurricular hobbies or activities that had nothing to do with endeavors that medical school admissions committees value most.
Absolutely and most applicants do! However, while it is fine if there is topic overlap between your most meaningful entries and your personal statement (this is the case for the majority of applicants) you want to write about each experience differently in the two documents.
