Which Activities Should I Emphasize on My Med School App?

Session 106

This nontrad has been out of school and working for a decade. She’s done so many things, she’s wondering what to highlight vs combine on her med school app!

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[00:24] Question of the Day

“I am a nontraditional student. I’ve finished my original undergrad almost 15 years ago. And since then, I went on and got a master’s degree and have been working as a professional in my current field for almost a decade. And I’m wondering how I can best highlight the work I’ve done in that decade. I’ve done committee work for national committees and presented at regional conferences and things. And mostly, I’m just curious if I should break those down into discrete separate chunks, or just put them all together in one description of activity when I go to throw out my applications?”

[01:09] Separating Activities

Because of this long timeframe of undergrad and then masters and now working, you have a lot of life experiences that need to fit into this very narrow box, especially on AMCAS. Now, on AACOMAS and TMDSAS, you don’t have those same limitations where you need to combine those and figure out what you need to leave out on your application.

The best thing you can do here is to combine things that are very similar and didn’t have a huge differing impact on you in your life. If there are committees you’ve been on where you participated, but you weren’t the key part of the committee, you didn’t change some procedure on the committee or procedure at the institution.

If it’s just committee after committee after committee and you didn’t have some spectacular impact on that position, then just combine those into one.

And if there’s one committee that really stood out where you were the chair of the committee, and you had lots of impact on that committee, then separate that out from the combined committee activity.

So you can have two committee activities in this specific example. One is the very specific, impactful one. And the other one is the combination of all of the other ones because they really weren’t that impactful to you. But it’s just to show the other activities that you’ve been involved in.

[04:09] How to Use Your Experience to Stand Out

By putting the activities in there that show the impact that you had, you’re already standing out because a lot of traditional students aren’t going to have those experiences. They’re not out in the workforce participating in these things. So you don’t need to really go too far out of your way to highlight the stuff you’re already going to be talking about in your application.

[05:22] Reason for Applying to Medical School

“I wanted to be a doctor as a kid. I was one of those kids that when I was four years old, I got the Fisher-Price doctor kit and wanted to be a doctor. And that lingered with me up through high school. Then right before applying to college, I chickened out because I had a hard time. I was struggling with my high school chemistry class and so I thought I couldn’t go major in biochemistry or I’ll have to take organic chemistry.

Part of that was just a lack of growth mindset I had when I was younger, which I developed as I got older. And part of it was my dad passing away and seeing firsthand how access to health care, especially in rural areas really impacted his own health outcomes. That’s personally what I would really love to do is to do primary care in rural areas.

And also, in my current job working with kids doing after school programs, especially STEM after-school programs. I’m encouraging them to go for their STEM dreams and go become engineers and computer coders and doctors, and then I’m not even taking my own advice.”

[07:16] Gaining Experiences

Our student today adds this:

“I started volunteering at the local hospital pretty much as soon as I started going back for prerequisite classes. There weren’t a ton of actual clinical opportunities, but I started volunteering. I was up in the inpatient unit, but we didn’t do a ton. Mostly, we just restocked rooms and linen carts and stuff like that. But we got to at least see what was going on. Even if we weren’t really anywhere close to involved.

And then I worked at the info desk, both at the main hospital and at the cancer center. That’s part of their system, but it’s in a separate building. More recently, I started volunteering with the Pre-Op Post Anesthesia Care Unit where I got to actually have a little bit more patient contact. I helped clean the rooms between patients, and I also help with patient transport. So it’s closer to the action for sure.

I was able to get one shadowing opportunity before COVID. And then since then, I’ve been doing as many virtual showing opportunities as I can. I also have done work with the Patient-Family Advisory Committee in my local primary care office. So I see a lot of the backend from that perspective and how they’re hoping to better communicate with patients and more of the logistical side of running a medical practice from that end.”

With COVID, that kind of throws a wrench in everything but moving forward. Whatever exposure and access they allow you to have, hopefully, it just continues to increase more and more. So you get to be with those patients as much as possible throughout the day and you are getting those shadowing experiences as much as possible.

[10:39] Preparing for the MCAT

Our student did college algebra and general biology for her non-majors. She did general bio one and two in her undergrad. So apart from a couple of psych classes, she might have to do all of her prereqs completely from scratch.

She just started building her plan and starting to study this summer. Then she’s taking Organic this Fall, and taking Biochem in the spring. So they should both be really fresh and she’ll be hopefully taking the test in April.

[12:01] Question on Timeline

Q: “I’ve been taking prereqs for the last three or four years now and only doing it part-time because I was working full-time. After my most recent shadowing experience, I just had to get it done. So this year, I’m going to school full-time, but I’m still working full-time. What needs to happen and when to be sure that I don’t have missing pieces laying around and I’m actually ready to apply this cycle?”

The nice thing about applying to medical schools is it’s really an open book test. You know everything you have to do. You have to have letters of recommendation and you have to take the MCAT. You need to take care of your classes and get good grades.

Then you need to start pre-writing your secondary essays so that you can turn those around as fast as possible and you also have to do all of your extracurricular descriptions. You also have to get your transcripts as soon as the applications open up.

So begin to plot out that timeline and figure out what you need to start working on this to give yourself x number of weeks. Then start working on this and give yourself x number of days or weeks.

[09:46] Avoiding Common Mistakes

Don’t let the candle burn at both ends where your A’s turn into C’s because you no longer have the bandwidth to keep up with your classes.

Make sure you either are super balanced and configure it all out and have it planned so you don’t get overwhelmed with it all. Or finish your classes and take the MCAT after you’re done with classes and apply after all of that. This will probably push you back another year. But there are lots of ways to work it out.

It all depends on you, your bandwidth, and your ability to handle everything coming at you all at the same time.

Another common mistake is that students fail to figure things out because it just all hits them in the face all at once. So it’s important to be able to really think through things.

[16:31] Virtual Shadowing

There are silver linings to this pandemic because people are now able to do things virtually, that they couldn’t have otherwise done before. Please check out eShadowing.com for virtual shadowing opportunities.

'The one nice thing about the pandemic is the things available virtually now that I never would have had the opportunity to go to in-person.'Click To Tweet