Mistakes to Avoid in Your W&A Section: Mistake #4

Premeds often approach the medical school application cycle all stressed over the personal statement. They budget a lot of time there but if you’ve read up to this point of the series, you should know by now that the W&A section deserves as much, if not more, of your time. Students often rush this section and admissions committees are left with vague, last-minute experience descriptions. 

There’s a reason that exams are a part of every class — they are meant to identify what you have learned to the professor. Similarly the Work & Activities section was created to test your ability to show what you’ve learned in 700 characters or less. With that being said, here is mistake #4 to avoid in your W&A section…

Mistake #4: Assuming the Admissions Committees Know What You Learned From an Experience

There’s this looming pressure for premeds to appear busy, like they’re perfectly juggling a lot of things, and can accomplish the supernatural. This is a mindset of someone focused on comparison. This often presents itself as a long list of responsibilities that is so overwhelming to the reader that they can’t even remember one of the tasks or roles you listed. You should be focused on value. To do this, mold each W&A entry around what you learned from the experience. Here’s some tips on how to do this in different ways:

1. Write A Takeaway Sentence For Each Entry. Start by reflecting on your experience and write down a one-sentence takeaway that discusses the most valuable lesson it taught you. Build your description around that takeaway, using only elements of that experience that support your main point. You may not be able to touch on every role or responsibility you held in that experience and that’s okay. It’s better to have an entry that is narrow but deep rather than wide and shallow.
2. Support Your Takeaways with an Example or Anecdote. This is a classic example of how to “show instead of tell.” Short stories are interesting for the reader and way more engaging than a list of completed duties. Check out my first post of this series here, where I talk all about incorporating anecdotes into your W&A section.
3. Discuss What Was Revealed to You About a Career as A Physician or the Field of Medicine. Maybe in one of your clinical experiences you learned about a certain field of medicine. Maybe as a research assistant you learned how clinical treatments start from a hypothesis in a lab. Admissions committees want to know that the time you spent in these experiences is valuable beyond those given hours.
4. Explain How What You Learned Will Help You as a Medical Student or Physician in the Future. This is absolutely vital. You need to explain the impact an experience has had on you and how you will use that impact to influence others and your future practice. Discussing competencies that you have learned or grown during your premed years that will make you into a better student and colleague is vital. After all, you are applying to become a medical student. Applying to medical school needs to be intentional. Your goal is to become a medical student to eventually become a physician. This should be evident all over your application.

You can mix and match these tips across your Work and Activities section as you’ll see some of them can be incorporated more organically into certain experiences than others. It’s important that you can show how you can learn from a variety of settings. Your GPA and MCAT show how you can learn from a school setting while your experiences demonstrate how you can learn in different interpersonal settings and other nontraditional classrooms. Have questions about the Work and Activities section? Leave them in the comments below.