Common Mistakes to Avoid When Writing Your Personal Statement (Part 3)

In this five-part blog series, we’ll highlight some of the most common mistakes we see applicants make as they approach the Personal Statement. Try your best to avoid them.

• Staying linear: You don’t need the essay to be linear. Imagine your intro paragraph as the opening sequence of a movie—the most thrilling ones start mid-scene. You want to see an action star in action, not waking up to a buzzing alarm clock. Don't save the excitement for many scenes later. Show yourself there, then explain how you got there. 

• Overusing passive voice: Keep most of your sentences active. Passive voice can minimize your contributions and slow down your essay's momentum. Active sentences move the statement forward. 

There is flexibility, of course. Some passive sentences aren't slow-going or unnatural. Take the passive "My research has been accepted for an oral presentation at the National Impressive Conference." vs. the active "The National Impressive Conference has accepted my research for an oral presentation." Honestly, both sentences are fine. Neither goes on too long nor is confusing. Both read as a natural way of speaking—the passive one might be a little more natural. 

There are also times when you'll use passive voice for effect, accuracy, clarity, or flow. Just be mindful of how often you're doing it. 

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Writing Your Personal Statement (Part 2)

In this five-part blog series, we’ll highlight some of the most common mistakes we see applicants make as they approach the Personal Statement. Try your best to avoid them.

• Being uptight: A personal essay is more like journalism than an academic paper. You're telling a story, and this one is about you. You want to sound intelligent and respectful but being a bit colloquial makes you appear confident and relaxed. As if to say, "This is who I am. This is who I plan to become." Boom.

Also, a profound statement is often a simple one. We've heard more than one app reader complain about needing to consult a dictionary because an applicant had been over-consulting a thesaurus. Another reason to write less formally: You're going to interview at these schools. (Hopefully!) If you don't speak at all how you write, they're going to be confused about who you really are. 

• Getting too poetic: Being a little poetic can show style, but if your point isn't clear, a beautiful turn of phrase is meaningless. One of our mottos is: "Clarity above all things." Leave no room for misinterpretation. The reader needs to see the story how you do. Crisp and untangled writing is also best given the character count limitation and how much you need to share. There is room for imagery but there isn't a lot of room for showiness. 

• Spouting off clichés: Nothing says, "I don't think outside of the box" quite like the phrase "I think outside of the box." We also read a lot of first drafts that include "puzzle pieces"—skip 'em, they're going to be in a thousand other essays. 

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Writing Your Personal Statement (Part 1)

Writing a Personal Statement is a massive undertaking. In a relatively short document, you’re trying to show the admissions committee who you are and what you value, while simultaneously building a case for why you will succeed in the program and, later, in your career. It’s a lot. But we can help. 

In this five-part blog series, we’ll highlight some of the most common mistakes we see applicants make as they approach the Personal Statement. Try your best to avoid them.

• Trying to include everything: You cannot fit every experience you've ever had into this essay—and hey, that's why you also submit a Resume or a Work and Activities section. Stick to one or two key experiences that prompted growth and reinforced your interest in the program. The Personal Statement is about showing depth. 

• Telling instead of showing: The admissions committee is looking for more than a list of your strengths and traits. Not only is that boring, it is unreliable. A good rule of writing is: “Show, don't tell." Listing off your qualities is meaningless if you're not backing them up with real-life examples. Instead of telling the reader, “I am a good leader because I am diligent and organized,” provide a leadership anecdote that will show you empowering your team. 

Similarly, don’t tell the school what you will do in the future without showing them why you are capable of achieving such things. We've said it before: Sharing goals works when what comes before it exemplifies your strengths and abilities. More than what you want to do, what you have done tells us who you are.

Your Medical School Personal Statement: Trust the (Writing) Process

Your Personal Statement is your opportunity to share your character, perspectives, abilities, and what has reinforced your commitment to studying medicine. Our best advice: keep it narrow. Your Work and Activities responses are your chance to show a broad overview of your experiences and the Personal Statement is a deep dive into one or two meaningful ones, grounded in a story. The most important question to answer in this essay is: Why are you capable of studying and practicing medicine?

Below is a writing process that we recommend. Give yourself enough time to work through this iterative process and create your most compelling work. 

Begin with a brainstorm. Do not underestimate the importance of this step. If you have not yet created your your brainstorm document, it’s not too late. This document will be immensely useful for writing Secondaries (and later, for interview prep!). 

Document your experiences, positive and negative, that prompted an evolution in your perspective—you know, those “ah-ha!” moments without which you would be a different student and/or person today. Then, record those experiences that will show the reader your abilities in critical thinking and problem solving, leadership, teamwork/collaboration, and empathy/connection, as well as those experiences that reinforced your interest in medical school. Capture as many details as possible, paying particular attention to what you thought, felt, said, and did in each situation. Your focus should be on adult experiences (from the start of college and later), though stories from your youth could comprise up to 20 percent of this brainstorm.

During your brainstorm, don’t limit yourself by worrying about a cohesive narrative, the quality of your writing, and/or the number/length of your stories. Simply focus on collecting those situations that helped to guide your path to this point and impacted your decision to apply to medical school.

Craft an outline. Select the key stories you will use to anchor your narratives. Remember that you’ll use your essays to go deep into experiences that demonstrate the traits you want to emphasize. An outline will make writing way easier, we promise, as the hardest part of writing a Personal Statement can be deciding on the essay’s structure. Consider how you can tell your stories in a way that will capture and hold the reader’s attention. A strong outline will save you time and stress.

Write. Keep in mind that you must be showing, not telling the reader who you are. In contrast to your Work and Activities section, which provides an overview of your experiences, your Secondary Essay responses should go deep into a story that allows the reader to come to their own conclusions about some of your character traits and abilities. Highlight how you’ve struggled, triumphed, learned, and how these experiences have developed you into the person you are now. Remember that what you’ve done and accomplished in the past is how you will prove to the admissions committee that you will be able to accomplish your future goals. 

Review. Revise. Repeat. Confirm your word count and read your essay aloud noting where you stumble. Make revisions as necessary. Once it reads smoothly, set it down and walk away for at least 24 hours. Then re-read it. Is it you? Is it personal and authentic? You want the reader to see the real person behind the applicant number. While we caution against “oversharing,” being appropriately vulnerable will create connection.

International Medical Experiences: What Med School Applicants Should Know

International medical experiences really do stand out, and no, it's not the exciting locale. Hospitals, clinics, and vaccine outreach programs abroad tend to be all-encompassing. You'll witness health disparities different from and similar to those in the United States. You'll meet patients and their families, take patient histories, shadow multiple healthcare workers or one very intensely, and learn how to administer basic tests. Such an experience may also immerse you in another language.

How to choose an experience. When choosing an experience, watch out for glossy marketing. There are for-profit international programs that are high-priced and low-quality—admissions committees find them inauthentic. Some other for-profit and even nonprofit international programs can be sketchy because they let volunteers do work that should be left to medical professionals. You won't impress a school if you've done something unique but unethical. A 2017 survey of medical schools by the AAMC found that 45-50% of respondents expressed concern over pre-med students performing procedures well out of their league—from suturing to delivering babies. Volunteering at a public hospital in a developing country is an ideal experience if you're having it in an ethical, legal, and safe way.

If you haven’t had an international experience yet, we recommend taking the University of Minnesota's Global Ambassadors for Patient Safety (GAPS) online workshop before choosing one. It is a free and valuable resource for pre-med students interested in responsibly volunteering abroad.

How to share your experience. It’s awkward to write this, but we've noticed this problem occurring among applicants. When you're writing about working in underserved communities locally or abroad, be wary of creating a heroic myth. When describing a patient at a free clinic or someone receiving a service from a nonprofit you're working with, you are describing a peer. You can depict helping someone without painting yourself as a saint-like figure. A doctor's role can be outsized and seemingly miraculous at times—but most times the role is servant. Channel that.

Your Work & Activities Section: Non-Clinical Experiences to Highlight (Part 7)

While medical schools need to see clinical experiences in your W&A section, they’re also looking to see non-clinical experiences that highlight your abilities in critical thinking and innovation, teamwork and collaboration, leadership, and empathy. The roles that we highlight throughout this week will demonstrate the wide-ranging experiences and qualities that you have to offer to your medical school community.

Hobbies: Hobbies are not superficial. Yes, your medical experiences, volunteer work, noteworthy club positions, and academic accolades are going to outrank this in the W&A. But, you have fifteen unique entries to fill, and you want to show different dimensions of yourself. We believe a hobby is a must in a W&A.

Your Work & Activities Section: Non-Clinical Experiences to Highlight (Part 6)

While medical schools need to see clinical experiences in your W&A section, they’re also looking to see non-clinical experiences that highlight your abilities in critical thinking and innovation, teamwork and collaboration, leadership, and empathy. The roles that we highlight throughout this week will demonstrate the wide-ranging experiences and qualities that you have to offer to your medical school community.

Campus Organizations: If you've dedicated years to the same organization, highlight your biggest accomplishments. What did you change as part of this organization, or what important tradition did you carry on? Did you bring anything medical into the mix? For example, when your sorority did charity work, was it for a medicine-related cause? If you have some control over your organization's next event, see if you can swing things in that direction. Incidentally, if your school has a pre-med club and you're not in it, join it now.

Your Work & Activities Section: Non-Clinical Experiences to Highlight (Part 5)

While medical schools need to see clinical experiences in your W&A section, they’re also looking to see non-clinical experiences that highlight your abilities in critical thinking and innovation, teamwork and collaboration, leadership, and empathy. The roles that we highlight throughout this week will demonstrate the wide-ranging experiences and qualities that you have to offer to your medical school community.

Conferences: Attending a conference is typically only a one-day time commitment, but it shows an interest in learning about the current state and future of medicine. Conferences can be very inspiring. These speakers were selected for a reason. Networking with doctors is great, and talking to any patients in attendance is even better. When you're writing this entry, don't just list what you did or heard at the conference, tell us how it affected you after that one day.

Outside of the W&A, having attended a conference can come in handy during an interview. You might be asked if there are any new developments in healthcare that you find riveting. If you attended a conference and subsequently read more about the topics discussed, you're going to have a lot of thoughts to share.

Your Work & Activities Section: Non-Clinical Experiences to Highlight (Part 4)

While medical schools need to see clinical experiences in your W&A section, they’re also looking to see non-clinical experiences that highlight your abilities in critical thinking and innovation, teamwork and collaboration, leadership, and empathy. The roles that we highlight throughout this week will demonstrate the wide-ranging experiences and qualities that you have to offer to your medical school community.

Science-Related Anything: A science-related club or volunteering experience will be attractive to schools because it shows a passion for scientific study. Tutoring and mentoring looks especially good because teaching is a big part of medicine. We had a client who spent a year's worth of Tuesday afternoons helping high school students learn about physiology. It improved his ability to break down information. You'll be teaching med students as a resident, residents as a fellow, fellows as an attending, and you'll be translating complexities for a layman patient daily.

Your Work & Activities Section: Non-Clinical Experiences to Highlight (Part 3)

While medical schools need to see clinical experiences in your W&A section, they’re also looking to see non-clinical experiences that highlight your abilities in critical thinking and innovation, teamwork and collaboration, leadership, and empathy. The roles that we highlight throughout this week will demonstrate the wide-ranging experiences and qualities that you have to offer to your medical school community.

Big Academic Wins: To include awards and accolades in the W&A, you must go beyond listing them. Give some background about what you had to achieve to be recognized. If you did a thesis as part of your school's Honors College program, share the process, skills you learned, and how you felt upon accomplishing this goal. If you had any help reaching your goal, say so. Did a mentor work with you during office hours? Did a librarian help you track down a rare manuscript? Medical schools love it when a candidate seeks, accepts, and appreciates help.

Your Work & Activities Section: Non-Clinical Experiences to Highlight (Part 2)

While medical schools need to see clinical experiences in your W&A section, they’re also looking to see non-clinical experiences that highlight your abilities in critical thinking and innovation, teamwork and collaboration, leadership, and empathy. The roles that we highlight throughout this week will demonstrate the wide-ranging experiences and qualities that you have to offer to your medical school community.

Non-Clinical Volunteering: Service is a huge part of medicine—but not all your service has to be medical. Schools like Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine that emphasize caring for the whole person will especially value roles in which you interacted with your community. Volunteering shows compassion and often builds communication and collaboration skills. Share a story where you connected with another person or collaborated with a team of other volunteers.

Such a position can also prove ingenuity. One of our clients volunteered at a non-profit that helped families register for SNAP benefits. After a couple of weeks on the job, she suggested changes to the organization's method for approaching people at family court hearings. She was able to connect with more caregivers who needed help as a result.

Your Work & Activities Section: Non-Clinical Experiences to Highlight (Part 1)

While medical schools need to see clinical experiences in your W&A section, they’re also looking to see non-clinical experiences that highlight your abilities in critical thinking and innovation, teamwork and collaboration, leadership, and empathy. The roles that we highlight throughout this week will demonstrate the wide-ranging experiences and qualities that you have to offer to your medical school community.

Research and/or Lab Work: Spotlight on Johns Hopkins: AMCAS matriculation data for the 2018 entering class stated that 96% had research or lab experience. If you want to attend a school famous for its research, you need more than one of these gigs. Even schools that aren't explicitly known for research love seeing multiple research positions in your W&A.

There's so much critical thinking involved in research. And there's the opportunity to be published—a slam dunk. In research work, you will collaborate with a team to accomplish a measurable and valuable task. The cooperation and diligence you need to be a part of such projects are exactly the qualities you want to highlight in your W&A and Personal Statement. You also want to include these qualities in the "game plan" that you send to a supervisor who you'd like to be one of your recommenders. Even being a small part of something can make a huge impact. We had a client who essentially did data entry for a research project, but her careful work caught two mistakes that would have ruined the data set. Her team credited her on a scientific paper for her contributions, an unexpected peacock-sized feather in her cap.

Critical Thinking in the Time of Gen AI

In need of a restaurant recommendation for a client dinner? Improved flow in a long email? Data consolidated into an easy-to-ingest format? 

For all of this and more, you might turn to AI. And, while Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are always waiting to answer, their very existence also prompts questions. Existential ones, like “How is my industry changing? What will my job look like in the next year… five years… 10 years? What skills will continue to matter? Am I prepared for my career now, and the one I’ll have in the future?”

In an article for Forbes, journalist Samantha Walravens honed in on how AI is affecting the current education space and workplace. “Colleges are racing to integrate AI, but students are entering a workforce that is evolving even faster,” she wrote. “For today’s graduates, survival in the job market will depend less on technical credentials alone and more on pairing AI literacy with judgment, adaptability, and the human skills that machines—as of yet—cannot replicate.”  

Moreover, while it may seem counterintuitive, it is our own innate intelligence and curiosity that is most complementary to AI. Anthropic’s Fourth Economic Index Report, published in January, describes research that found that the correlation between the sophistication of a person’s prompt and that of Claude’s response was “nearly perfect” at 0.92. In other words, Claude’s response met the intellectual level of the operator. Cornelia C. Walther Ph.D., who described this finding in Psychology Today, wrote, “AI mirrors human abilities, literally. In this new era, the most valuable technological skills for hybrid citizens will remain knowledge, critical thinking, and a quirky mind.” 

Alas, the very existence of generative AI may be robbing us of such gifts. A recent MIT study showed that as we increase our use of AI, we are prone to cognitive offloading—or letting the AI do the thinking for us. This, in turn negatively impacts our critical thinking skills as we engage less deeply in the work and/or decision-making and trust the machine more. 

Michel Gerlich, Ph.D., Head of Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability and Head of Executive Education and Senior Faculty at Swiss Business School, also led a research study on AI and critical thinking and garnered similar findings. He wrote, “The study highlighted that users who trust AI tools are more likely to rely on them for decision-making, thus reducing their engagement in critical thinking processes. This trust, fostered by the perceived reliability and convenience of AI tools, promotes a cognitive dependence that diminishes the need for active cognitive effort.” 

So, what can we do to stop our own disengagement? First, Walther urges us to change our philosophical conception of AI. She wrote, “We must stop viewing AI as a ‘magic box’ and start viewing it as a cognitive exoskeleton. An exoskeleton only moves as well as the person inside it. If the person is stationary, the suit does nothing.” 

Tactically, Wanqing Zhang, Educational Developer and Learning Experience Designer, provides three steps for actively engaging your critical thinking skills while you use AI on her Think to Learn YouTube channel. 

Her guidelines for making the most of AI: 

• Define your context. Zhang suggests starting with an active process of defining your goals for each query or project. What are you really looking to do? How will AI assist you? What are your criteria for success? What are your constraints? What will happen if things go wrong?

• Confirm the sources. Do not trust the sources provided by AI. Confirm their veracity, by going to listed sources and reviewing them. Do they say what AI is saying they do? Are they reputable? 

• Consider what would change your mind. What information would make you reject the AI recommendation? When might you decide that the strategy isn’t working? What new information could come to light that would make you consider alternatives? Zhang uses the example of an AI-generated marketing strategy: If engagement dips by X percent, will that spur you to pivot? 

AI might be changing the world around us in so many ways. But some things don’t change, including the need to meet each decision with our full curiosity, engagement, critical thinking, and humanity. If we can do that, we can make the most of AI as a tool. 

Your Work & Activities Section: Clinical Gigs that Medical Schools Love (Part 4)

Perhaps the most important W&A entries are about clinical experiences. Admissions committees need to know: Does this candidate have enough clinical experience to know what they're getting into? The roles that we highlight throughout this week will demonstrate that you have seen medical care in action and gained experience with patients.

Shadowing: Shadowing is great introductory clinical exposure and prevalent among applicants—88% of Johns Hopkins' 2018 accepted students had shadowing experience. But to med schools, shadowing weighs less than volunteering at free clinics, doing clinical research, or working as a medical scribe, etc. That's because it typically doesn't lead to significant patient interactions. Still, shadowing someone in a field you're very interested in is informative, and you can have poignant experiences. We had one client who shadowed an infectious disease doctor abroad and learned that potential life-altering treatments regularly can't cross international lines.

Since patient interaction isn't common in these scenarios, you want to emphasize how else a shadowing experience helped you build clinical skills or expanded your knowledge of a medical specialty, preferably one you're interested in pursuing after medical school. If these things don't apply to your shadowing experience, here are some other things to consider: What did you see—and how did it affect you? Did a doctor calmly handle an angry patient? Did you seek more information on any condition a physician diagnosed in front of you? Did you learn something about a doctor's day-to-day life that you didn't know before? Unless you had one incredible experience or really need to fill up your W&A, grouping your shadowing experiences in one entry is a great idea.

Connect Your Shadowing to Your Future. If you know what area of medicine you'd like to study, having multiple shadowing experiences with different physicians practicing the same specialty shows the depth of that interest. That makes for a powerful shadowing entry. Who you shadow should be relevant to your goals. If you're interested in congenital heart disease because you worked on a clinical research study related to it or your dad survived a heart attack, try to shadow multiple cardiologists. Shadowing a broad range of specialties is exciting and may indeed be a part of your deciding what field you're most interested in—that makes for a strong entry. But there's something sturdy and assuring about a med school candidate who has pursued one area in depth. A consistent interest is compelling.

Your Work & Activities Section: Clinical Gigs that Medical Schools Love (Part 3)

Perhaps the most important W&A entries are about clinical experiences. Admissions committees need to know: Does this candidate have enough clinical experience to know what they're getting into? The roles that we highlight throughout this week will demonstrate that you have seen medical care in action and gained experience with patients.

Research Jobs with Clinical Exposure: A twofer! You'll learn about one area of medicine in-depth and get to know patients. As a hospital research coordinator, one client became a passionate advocate for sickle cell disease (SCD) patients' health and dignity. Through surveying patients at every appointment, he developed strong bonds with them and their families. He learned about the daily trials of the disease and the stigma surrounding its most common treatment: opioids. Hospital staff often treated patients in extreme pain as drug-seekers. One 19-year-old told our client: "I just want to be respected." It affected our client deeply. His involvement in this clinical research project spurred him to join two studies investigating new SCD drug treatments.

Your Work & Activities Section: Clinical Gigs that Medical Schools Love (Part 2)

Perhaps the most important W&A entries are about clinical experiences. Admissions committees need to know: Does this candidate have enough clinical experience to know what they're getting into? The roles that we highlight throughout this week will demonstrate that you have seen medical care in action and gained experience with patients.

Free Clinic Volunteer: You'll interact with patients, doctors, and other medical professionals while providing care essential to your community. You'll meet patients with a variety of medical needs, and your entry about working at the free clinic should be about direct patient interaction. (You need at least one patient-interaction in your W&A.) Runner up for the best entry focus is a learning experience you had with a staff member. Showing yourself as a problem-solver is great.

We had a client in charge of patient intake at a neighborhood free clinic. He spoke to many patients and observed a wide variety of minor ailments that sharpened his focus on becoming a general practitioner. We had another shy client who volunteered at a local college clinic administering COVID-19 tests, meeting with the same student athletes weekly, and developing her communication skills and personal relationships. She also took it upon herself to hop on the clinic's phone and assist parents and students in finding COVID-19 testing information on the university's confusing website. What she did in those instances was not medical but showed that she was a patient and caring person. It also allowed her to express in a Most Meaningful entry how having the testing information available only on the website, and in a hidden place at that, was a barrier to student care that is emblematic of a greater problem in the healthcare space. Her bottom line: Patients need easy access to accurate, understandable information regarding their own care.

Your Work & Activities Section: Clinical Gigs that Medical Schools Love (Part 1)

Perhaps the most important W&A entries are about clinical experiences. Admissions committees need to know: Does this candidate have enough clinical experience to know what they're getting into? The roles that we highlight throughout this week will demonstrate that you have seen medical care in action and gained experience with patients.

Medical Scribe: This is one of our favorite types of clinical experience. Working as a scribe allows you to see doctor patient interactions up close; you'll expand your medical vocabulary, read about things touched on in appointments (there's that intellectual curiosity!), and be a valuable part of a medical team. You can scribe at a top hospital or a CityMD clinic. What matters is exposure. Don't just describe the job to the school (they know what it is); share a meaningful story. One client, a head scribe, witnessed a death in the ER. It threw him—and he decided to create a guide for scribing in traumatic situations for the scribes he supervised. We've also had several clients discover a new field of interest through scribe work.

EMT: You'll learn basic life support (BLS) and work in high-pressure scenarios. We had a client who worked as an EMT, and on his second day, he arrived at the home of his third-grade teacher, who had taken a bad fall. He kept her calm while his superiors carefully moved her. What he did was not medical, but it prepared her to receive medical attention. Another client performed CPR on a patient, tag teaming with an experienced colleague so neither would become too fatigued and lag in compressions. Their persistence paid off; their patient survived. As an EMT, you'll have opportunities to help people and maybe even save lives. You can learn a lot from your colleagues, too. They've seen it all.

Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA): This job will require a 4-to-16-week state-approved training program at a local community college or through the Red Cross. It will also involve major grunt work. And guess what you need to get used to? You'll be responsible for multiple patients, taking their vitals, making sure they're moving, eating, and drinking water. You'll work closely with a medical team. You don't have to work full-time, and the hours are flexible. It's also a paid gig, and actual clinical jobs can look more impressive than volunteering. We've never had a client who was a CNA. And it's no wonder—it involves taking a test, it's low-paying, and it's hard. But that's why we'd like to see an applicant write about this role.

Your Work & Activities Section: Before You Start

Before we make a case for the kinds of experiences you should include in your W&A and get into the deep details you should be sharing, we're going to give you three super-basic tips for writing these entries. Bookmark/screenshot this page and keep it accessible because you are going to want to check that you're doing these three things in each entry that you write.

1. Use complete sentences. This is not a resume. You might have done an activity log when presenting your candidacy to your pre-med committee. That will be an excellent resource, but it's probably not polished, and these entries must be.

2. Go beyond the "what." Don't just describe a job you did. Share details about how this experience challenged, changed, or motivated you. Through anecdotes, show the qualities that medical schools are looking for, which include leadership and critical thinking abilities, empathy, strong communication skills, resilience, intellectual curiosity, and maturity.

3. Utilize your space well. For general entries, you'll have 700 characters with spaces to tell your story. Aim to max out that character count. Each experience should warrant it—700 is not that many characters. For the Most Meaningful entries, you'll have 700 characters with spaces, followed by an additional 1,325 with spaces. If you come up short on either section of the Most Meaningful entries, don't worry about it, so long as you have something compelling in each section.

Getting Started on Your W&A Entries

If you’re feeling stuck or if you just want to improve your W&A writing experience and the quality of your entries, start here:

Raid your brainstorm. Your brainstorm serves every part of your application process. If you're having a hard time with W&A entries, copy and paste info directly from a brainstorm bucket or two and cut and sew together the first draft of an entry from that material.

Do a dirty draft—and re-read it later. You don't have to refine your first draft text right away. If it were us, we'd write all 15 first drafts (that doesn't have to happen in one sitting) and then go back to the entries with fresh eyes later. Sometimes when you're reading one entry repeatedly back to-back, you see what's in your head and not what is on the page. So, you might think a description isn't missing words or makes perfect sense. But later, you'll read it, discover issues, and ask, "Who wrote this?"

Start with the easy ones. Do you know what your takeaway was from shadowing a pediatrician? Did working on a poster presentation with a group help you learn to manage conflict? Have you been swimming competitively since you were a guppy? Instead of writing W&A entries in the order of their occurrence or importance, start with whatever comes naturally.

Craft your stories. You'll always share some basic duties and details; and they can be pretty cut and dry. For example, "At the free clinic, I checked in patients and learned how to take vitals. I interacted with approximately 20 patients during every four-hour shift." But you must also include what you got out of this experience, preferably using an engaging anecdote. "One patient, Linda…" If you don't think you have a specific story to tell, dig deep and find one. You'll be surprised at how much of a story you can fit into 700 characters. But don't worry about going over your character count in your first draft. You can always pare down later, if necessary.

Using Hobbies to Enhance Your AMCAS Work & Activities Section

Hobbies. They are not a make or break component of the medical school (and later, residency) application, but they are an opportunity to provide the admissions committee with a view of the person beyond the test scores. Hobbies are also an effective way to demonstrate how you will add to the diversity of the incoming class, showcase qualities you will need as a medical student/physician, and/or provide insight into how you may relieve stress during medical school. 

Within the AMCAS application, hobbies belong in the Work & Activities section under the extracurriculars category. Applicants can provide up to four experiences under each category type, with a 700 character (with spaces) count, unless the experience is designated “most meaningful” (requires an additional 1,325 characters with spaces). 

Below are our guidelines for adding hobbies to your AMCAS application:

• Be current. If you played the trumpet in the high school band, but haven’t picked it up since then, consider what hobbies are more relevant to your life now. What do you turn to for fun, and what do you see yourself doing for stress relief in medical school?

• Be specific in your description. Provide a sense of how often, and how long you have been pursuing the hobby, as well as what the hobby entails. It’s great that you love to read, do yoga, and travel, but so do many others. In what unique ways have you engaged with your interests? Did you launch a monthly book club for discussing the NYT best sellers? Write book reviews for the school paper? Did you gain a yoga teaching certification or take part in a unique yoga retreat? Do you travel to particular destinations or participate in medical experiences abroad?

• State how your hobby has impacted your personal growth. Did an experience within your hobby contribute to a change in your perspective or influence your decision to apply to medical school? What attributes have you developed through your hobby that will benefit you as a medical student and physician (resilience, effective communication and collaboration skills, empathy, the ability to thrive in a diverse environment, etc.)? 

• When possible, provide an experience or milestone that differentiates your involvement in the hobby. Many people play an instrument, but fewer start a quartet or play in the university band. Many people enjoy running or fitness, fewer run the NY marathon to support a favorite cause/organization or start a running club. Providing the specific way(s) that you’ve engaged with your hobby will demonstrate to the admissions committee what you may offer to your incoming class.