Writing the work and activities section can be so difficult with how few characters you get. You also have to deal with how to classify your activities section on the AMCAS and how to impress the medical school admissions committee readers. Today, I walk you through the character limits, types of activities and their classifications, 2 main writing approaches, and my own experience and example descriptions. Let’s take a look!
The AMCAS has multiple parts to it and one of them is the activities section. This can be tricky in some cases due to the small character limits and also the many ways of approaching it. If you are wondering “how do I write the AMCAS activities section?” Well, I’m here to help walk you through it and share what approach I took when I did it last year.
First, I want to lay out what the activity section looks like:
You can add up to 15 different activities. There are categories for this so you have to pick what fits your activity best, but it encompasses everything, even hobbies! Here are the options:
- Community Service/Volunteer – Medical/Clinical
- Community Service/Volunteer – Not Medical/Clinical
- Conferences Attended
- Extracurricular Activities
- Hobbies
- Honors/Awards/Recognitions
- Intercollegiate Athletics
- Leadership – Not Listed Elsewhere
- Military Service
- Other
- Paid Employment – Medical/Clinical
- Paid Employment – Not Medical/Clinical
- Physician Shadowing/Clinical Observation
- Presentations/Posters
- Publications
- Scientific Research/Lab
- Social Justice/Advocacy
- Teaching/Tutoring/Teaching Assistant
In total, there’s 19 of them. You can only choose one though! What I found was that a lot of my activities could be multiple of these, so I just had to pick the one I felt it best represented.
Within each individual activity, you will have to type out the:
Experience name
Contact name, their title, email address, and phone number
Organization name
City/state/country
Most meaningful experience (Yes or no question, you can have a max of 3 of these)
Completed hours (plus start and end date)
Anticipated hours (plus start and end time)
Now, these are all kind of self explanatory, but I wanted to explain the meaningful experience designation. These are experiences that you deem to be the “most meaningful” in your journey and as a result, they give you more character count/words to explain it. You normally get 700 characters to give your description and with this designation, you get an additional 1,350 characters. That’s a huge increase! With this, you can tell stories or really explain why it was important and what you did.
That brings me to approaches to the actual writing. You can approach it very fact based and just describe what you actually did, or you can do a story based description. I’ll give an example of each, don’t worry!
Here’s an example of a descriptive, factual one:
Mercury (Hg) is a nephrotoxicant that leads to kidney failure. The mechanisms of Hg uptake in proximal tubule cells are not fully understood and are the focus of my current project. Using HEK-293 cells, I am testing if the organic anion transporter is involved in the uptake of Hg-cyanide (Hg-CN). Dr. B taught me experimental design to detect whether uptake occurs, if the process is passive transport, and the transport kinetics. We each analyze the results and through the process, I’ve experienced growth in my critical thinking as we adjust our hypotheses and design new experiments. Many people suffer from Hg-CN damage and I hope my project leads to a better understanding of their condition.
See how it just tells what I am doing in the lab and what I’ve learned? I think it is very straightforward and doesn’t get much into trying to entertain. Contrast that with the story based one:
“Is the rat down yet?” Dr. X asked as I pinched the tail with no response from the rat. “The rat’s down. We can start”, I replied as I placed it onto the operating table. I harvested and weighed the rat’s liver and kidneys in preparation to determine the amount of mercury in each. I was enthralled by the experience of dissecting rats as it reminded me of procedures I’d only been able to watch in my clinical experiences. Just a few months before this moment, I was introduced to what research was in my honors program. I was captivated since I had family members and patients who suffered from diseases with few treatment options.
This doesn’t fully tell what I did in the lab, but it definitely tells a story about how excited I was about research and how I connected it with taking care of suffering people. It is a little bit more entertaining in my opinion than the previous description and this should be one of your goals.
My application had a 50/50 blend of factual, straightforward explanations and then story based. The thought process I went through here is that the admissions committee member reading my descriptions is thinking “Would I want to have coffee with this person to learn more?”.
They’re human after all and you want to give them reasons to continue reading! We all lose attention if something is boring. What’s better than reading a good story? Not much. Just keep this in mind.
I recommend writing a description and then eliminating any use of the words “that” or “the” or anything that is an unnecessary modifying adjective. This will save you precious character space! I had to go through and do this so many times to make my descriptions more concise and I could add more info.
You may also want to work with your pre-medical advisor and close family friends or personal friends to have them read your stuff. Ask them if they think it’s entertaining and decriptive of what you did.
Even better, ask them if they have any questions about it. I did this and found out there were some sentences I wrote to mean one thing that came across meaning something else to a reader. They may also be sentences that make sense to you, but to someone unfamiliar with the experience, they may be lost.
Don’t use acronyms or field specific terms either. You never know what the background of these admissions folks will be. If you use acronyms and field words like EEG (electroencephalogram) or Hg (mercury). Someone might not know their periodic table or might know of an Hg that stands for “hemorrhagic gout” (I totally made that up, but you get the point!).
For classifying your experiences, you want to make sure you watch what you call medical/clinical work. If you worked a front desk job at a clinic/hospital where you shuffled papers and filed things, I would say it is not clinical experience. If you write down a job like this and call it clinical experience, you risk the admissions committee thinking you are not honest or just straight up don’t understand what patient care is. Not good!
If you want to figure out if your activity was clinical experience, ask this:
-Did you interact face to face with patients?
-Did you do injections, take blood, fit medical instruments, take vitals, etc on patients?
-Were you assisting a doctor during procedures and/or moving the patient around the building?
Just think of stuff like this and most stuff with direct interaction with patients will be patient care/clinical!
Hopefully this will leave you feeling much better about what the activities section looks like, how to approach the descriptions in two different ways, and what two of my own examples were!
Want to make sure you get the timing correct on your AMCAS primary? Check out my write up here.
Gearing up to write secondary essays for medical school? Check out my guide to secondary essays here.