The Work and Activities section of the AMCAS application lets you include up to fifteen experiences that are important to you. Within these fifteen, AAMC asks you to choose three experiences that you consider “most meaningful.”

First, let’s start with examples of the thirteen “less meaningful” experiences.

Choosing and Describing Your Experiences

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I strongly advise you to include up to 10 to 12 experiences; you can do more if you have them, but be careful about including random items just to fill up room. Once you have your experiences, you need to classify them in one of the following categories:

• Paid employment (not military)
• Paid employment (military)
• Community service / volunteer (not medical / clinical)
• Community service / volunteer (medical / clinical)
• Research / lab
• Teaching / tutoring
• Honors / awards / recognitions
• Conferences attended
• Presentations / posters
• Publications
• Extracurricular / hobbies / avocations
• Leadership (not listed elsewhere)
• Intercollegiate athletics
• Artistic endeavors
• Other

Now, for the most important part… describing your experiences! For the entries you don’t consider your “most meaningful,” you only have 700 characters to explain yourself.

An example of a bad description

Experience: Debate Team
Description: Member, won second place at a convention

What’s wrong with this? It doesn’t explain responsibilities or accomplishments. Each of your descriptions should focus on the results of your experience.

An example of a description done well

Experience: Debate Team
Description: Participated in rigorous weekly debates regarding current political issues.
Met with students from all over the United States at seasonal conventions; Won 2nd Place at the Spring 2014 Conference, which had a turnout of over 700 students from the top schools in the nation.

Notice that the last sentence makes the activity look impressive since it gives context to the achievement. It gives a “result” to your experience of being on the debate team.

Your Three Most Meaningful Experiences

Out of your 15 activities, you should check off three “most meaningful” experiences that you feel had the greatest impact on you personally and explain them in the 700 character limit plus an additional 1,325 for this section. This is your opportunity to show off your strengths. Your most meaningful experiences should be:

• A unique or unusual story that others have not experienced
• An experience that had a profound impact on who you are
• It should include a lesson that you learned

Although you are required only to check off one experience as your most memorable, go ahead and take advantage of the opportunity and pick the maximum of three.

Your most meaningful experience summary should show rather than tell. Keep this in mind and try to structure your descriptions in the following way:

1. Begin by explaining the activity and what you did
2. Why you did the activity
3. What you learned from the experience

This structure covers all the bases and should be done concisely — roughly three paragraphs. Along with being concise, keep your summary honest. The application committee can likely tell if you’re not telling the truth and you might be asked to explain these experiences in-person during an interview.

Do You Have the Kind of Experiences That Count?

Before you can write standout experience descriptions in your AMCAS application you’ll first need to earn the experiences. What kind of experiences do medical schools want you to have, and how do you find those?

My online self-assessment for premeds demonstrates how to evaluate and improve the quality of your experiences, so as your next step I recommend that you take the self-assessment.