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When you are filling out your med school application, you need to fill in your extracurriculars. What should you be doing to keep track and prove your ECs?
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Back to today’s episode, when you apply to medical school, you need to document your ECs in the application for AACOMAS, AMCAS, and TMDSAS. And there are several things you need to document as you’re going through this process and put down in your EC activities.
But what exactly do they need to know?
You don’t have to prove anything. There’s nothing you need signed. There’s no specific forms that need to get filled out from your volunteering or shadowing experience or work.
'There's no official documentation for this. It's all based on the honor system.'Click To TweetYou need to know the company or the organization you were volunteering with or working at. You need to have a contact point person (ex. supervisor, physician, etc.) Know their email address or phone number. You’re going to need to know general locations and all the basic information. Then categorize all of the ECs based on leadership experience, volunteer experience, clinical, non-clinical, etc.
But the key part you need to document, and probably the most important part, is the hours that you’ve collected.
Again, there’s nothing to prove here. They’re not going to worry about the complete number of hours you’ve worked and they’re not going to check that.
Just give a ballpark figure. Just run a couple math lines and equations. You’re going to put date ranges. So if you worked for four years, then give the month and year all the way to the month and year.
If you worked during Freshman year and not during Sophomore year and then you worked again in Junior year, put each of those date ranges in your application along with the hours associated with those.
'Dates, you need to know. Not specific, but month and year are the dates that are necessary.'Click To TweetYou can put out the dates all the way through when you’re going to matriculate into medical school. However, you can’t estimate your hours out that far. You can only put hours up until what you’ve done to this point. But you’re anticipated end date for that activity can go all the way out to when you’re going to start medical school.
You need to know the people, supervisors, and their contact information – number, email, addresses, and date ranges. Again, there is nothing official about this. Estimate it. Ball park it and put the best answer you have there. That’s all you’re going to need.
This is just outside of the description of your EC itself, of course, which will be discussed on another episode.
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