Mistakes to Avoid in Your W&A Section: Mistake #3

As seen with the first two posts of this series, imagery is so important when writing your Work and Activities section, or any written portion of your application for that matter. In order to do this, you have to be specific with the details. Use strong verbs and descriptive adjectives, this is not a moment to be lazy with word choice or assume it doesn’t matter. Writing my application was so difficult for me because I was used to using “boring” or plain language in most of my writing as a science major. To go from writing formulaic, straightforward lab reports to personal narratives in the med school application, definitely took a few rounds of editing and adjusting my word choice. It’s important to describe the details of each activity in full to the best of your ability with 700 characters, which brings me to my next mistake to avoid:

Mistake #3: Leaving Out the Details

The common advice you will hear is “either tell them how the experience impacted you or how you impacted the experience.” There are a lot of activities that you will participate in where you wear many different hats and have a variety of responsibilities. It’s easy to fall into the trap where you want to tell the admissions committee everything that you did to demonstrate how involved you were and how you can be trusted with a variety of tasks. Don’t do this. Pick and choose wisely what you tell the admissions committees. It’s better to illustrate your impact in one area than to shallowly describe all your actions (think “better to be the master of one rather than the jack of all trades” on this one). Now that you’ve got extra characters to spend on writing about impact, use your words wisely. Here are three ways you can illustrate impact:

1. Use Numbers. One of the easiest ways you can add valuable detail to your Work and Activities entries is by using numbers. Instead of saying, “As a teaching assistant, I guided students through dissections in the anatomy laboratory,” write, “As a teaching assistant, I guided groups of twelve students through weekly dissections in the anatomy laboratory.” You’ll see in this example, specifying the number of students (twelve) and the frequency (weekly) add to the overall image of the activity.
2. Relate to The Core Competencies for Entering Medical Students. The AAMC has a list of 15 competencies that entering medical students should aim to meet. You can check out that list here. It’s important that you incorporate the competencies into your application so if you need help describing the impact of an activity, you can use these competencies to frame it. Whether the activity taught you one of these traits or whether you demonstrated one of them, it’s important to illustrate each one in your application.
3. Influence on You as a Future Medical Student/Physician. Maybe you worked as a scribe and in an interdisciplinary environment which demonstrated to you the importance of teamwork as a future physician. Maybe you volunteered in a food bank which exposed you to the non-clinical barriers to health such as access to healthy foods which you will be aware of when advocating for patients in the future. Admissions committees want to know what you learned and what you will do with that new knowledge.

It’s super important to illustrate depth in each of your Work and Activities entries. Remember, it’s much better to write about one part of the experience in greater detail than list off a bunch of responsibilities. I hope these different methods are helpful for you!  Still have questions? Leave them in the comments below!