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.
1. Experience Type
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.
2. Experience Title/Name
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.
3. Start Date/End Date
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 May 2022 as the start and end dates and enter 0
(zero) in the completed hours field.
How Should I List The End Date If The Activity Is Ongoing?
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.
4. AMCAS Work and Activities Hours
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.
Should I List Expected Hours If I’m Currently Doing The Activity?
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.
How Should I Enter Hours For Awards & Recognitions?
For awards and honors, it is fine to enter “zero” hours. We have called AMCAS in the past to confirm this.
5. Organization Name
Enter an organization name that is most closely associated with the experience.
6. Location (City/State/Country)
It is important to enter the location of your experience accurately.
What If My Activity Took Place In Multiple Locations?
If an experience took place in multiple locations, choose the one that dominated the time spent.
7. AMCAS Contact Name & Title Example: Franklin Scott, PhD, Principal Investigator
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.
What If There Isn’t a Contact Available?
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!
8. Experience Summary
Don’t Use Bullet Points! Medical schools will not see any formatting on the application itself.
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?
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- Write about your roles and responsibilities.
- When possible, try to demonstrate “results” or “impact” for your experiences. For example, if you worked on a fundraiser, mention how much money you raised. If you were the leader of a club, organization, or group, mention by how much membership grew while you were in charge.
- What qualities and characteristics did you demonstrate?
- Finally, if you have the space, write about what you learned, what insights you gained and offer some introspection about the experience. How did the experience impact your thinking, outlook, or goals?
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.
