Common AMCAS Questions: You Asked, We Answered.

We’re going to answer some of the most frequently asked AMCAS questions here.  Let’s dive in!

Who should I ask to write recommendation letters?

You should go a step beyond a school's expectations when you request recommendations. We suggest you aim for:

• At least two science professors 

• At least one non-science professor

• Medical professionals. Note: You don't have to stick to M.D.s; osteopathic physicians, nurse practitioners, EMTs, medical students—anyone who supervised you is gold.

• Supervisors at your job, volunteer posts, and extracurricular activities.

Review our blog for more on this topic. 

How do I select my Work & Activities “Most Meaningful Experiences” entries?

Ah, the "Most Meaningful," your chance to share more about what you most value and have learned from—in seemingly random character limits of 700 and 1,325 with spaces. 

We like for two of the three Most Meaningful entries to be about clinical or research experiences. If you took a gap year to work, you might make the third entry about that job. More and more applicants are working full-time after college. Even if your full-time work experience is outside the medical field, you're learning in a competitive, stressful environment. This is attractive to schools. 

Our advice for drafting your Most Meaningful entries: In the initial 700, share your role and duties, what you valued about the role, and start to say what you gained from it through a singular example. In the 1,325, deepen the anecdote that exemplifies what you brought to and took from the experience. 

Review our blog for more on writing your W&A section. 

Should I answer the “Other Impactful Experiences” question?

This question text states that not all candidates are expected to respond. Rather, it is for those who have had “major challenges or obstacles.” We urge you to consider any significant challenges that you have faced, using the following questions:

1. Did this experience impact my life in a way that provides meaningful context to my application? Examples of such adversity include: Facing a significant health challenge such as cancer or a disability; serving as the guardian to your younger siblings, while also attending classes (likely, negatively impacting your resume); living in an underserved medical community that made it difficult to gain shadowing or clinical experiences, but also inspired your interest in rural medicine. 

2. What did I learn from the experience? Your essay response should detail the adversity, but should focus on what you learned from going through the experience. Did this experience provide you with an “ah-ha!” moment that changed your perspective and impacted your life? If the take-aways from the adversity do not feel relevant to your application (i.e., your learnings do not clearly make you a stronger candidate for a medical school), you should reconsider the take-aways or including the experience.

3. Have I already spoken to this experience in my personal statement? You will want to avoid redundancy by sharing different stories and anecdotes in this essay and your personal statement. If you fully explored the experience in your personal statement, do not feel compelled to re-write about the experience here. Not all applicants are expected to have responses to this question.

Review our blog on this question for additional context.

When do I need to submit the AMCAS application?

We recommend that you submit your application no later than early to mid-June because your application will go through a verification process prior to the data being released to medical schools. This can take anywhere from a couple of weeks early in the process, to over a month during peak application submission periods. Note, in order to complete verification, your application must contain your official transcript, so request this document as well as your letters of recommendation a month or two before your planned submission date. 

You also want to submit your AMCAS application early because this step triggers schools to send out secondary application materials, either automatically, or after a pre-screen of your application.

Review our blog with suggested application timing.

Your Premed Priorities: Non-Clinical Experiences that Medical Schools Love

For a strong W&A section, you’ll want to highlight both clinical and non-clinical experiences. Your non-clinical experiences are an excellent way to demonstrate some of the traits and characteristics that will lead to your success in medical school, while also showing some personality. Here are a few of the non-clinical experiences that medical schools love to see.

Research and/or Lab Work: AMCAS matriculation data for the 2018 entering class at Johns Hopkins stated that 96% had research or lab experience. If you want to attend a school famous for its research, you need more than one of these gigs. Even schools that aren't explicitly known for research love seeing multiple research positions in your W&A.

There's so much critical thinking involved in research. And there's the opportunity to be published—a slam dunk. In research work, you will collaborate with a team to accomplish a measurable and valuable task. The cooperation and diligence you need to be a part of such projects are exactly the qualities you want to highlight in your W&A and Personal Statement. Even being a small part of something can make a huge impact. We had a client who essentially did data entry for a research project, but her careful work caught two mistakes that would have ruined the data set. Her team credited her on a scientific paper for her contributions, an unexpected peacock-sized feather in her cap.

Non-Clinical Volunteering: Service is a huge part of medicine—but not all your service has to be medical. Schools like Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine that emphasize caring for the whole person will especially value roles in which you interacted with your community. Volunteering shows compassion and often builds communication and collaboration skills. Share a story where you connected with another person or collaborated with a team of other volunteers.

Such a position can also prove ingenuity. One of our clients volunteered at a non-profit that helped families register for SNAP benefits. After a couple of weeks on the job, she suggested changes to the organization's method for approaching people at family court hearings. She was able to connect with more caregivers who needed help as a result.

Big Academic Wins: To include awards and accolades in the W&A, you must go beyond listing them. Give some background about what you had to achieve to be recognized. If you did a thesis as part of your school's Honors College program, share the process, skills you learned, and how you felt upon accomplishing this goal. If you had any help reaching your goal, say so. Did a mentor work with you during office hours? Did a librarian help you track down a rare manuscript? Medical schools love it when a candidate seeks, accepts, and appreciates help.

Science-Related Anything: A science-related club or volunteering experience will be attractive to schools because it shows a passion for scientific study. Tutoring and mentoring looks especially good because teaching is a big part of medicine. We had a client who spent a year's worth of Tuesday afternoons helping high school students learn about physiology. It improved his ability to break down information. You'll be teaching med students as a resident, residents as a fellow, fellows as an attending, and you'll be translating complexities for a layman patient daily. 

Conferences: Attending a conference is typically only a one-day time commitment, but it shows an interest in learning about the current state and future of medicine. Conferences can be very inspiring. These speakers were selected for a reason. Networking with doctors is great, and talking to any patients in attendance is even better. When you're writing this entry, don't just list what you did or heard at the conference, tell us how it affected you after that one day. 

Outside of the W&A, having attended a conference can come in handy during an interview. You might be asked if there are any new developments in healthcare that you find riveting. If you attended a conference and subsequently read more about the topics discussed, you're going to have a lot of thoughts to share.

Campus Organizations: If you've dedicated years to the same organization, highlight your biggest accomplishments. What did you change as part of this organization, or what important tradition did you carry on? Did you bring anything medical into the mix? For example, when your sorority did charity work, was it for a medicine-related cause? If you have some control over your organization's next event, see if you can swing things in that direction. Incidentally, if your school has a pre-med club and you're not in it, join it now.

Hobbies: Hobbies are not superficial. Yes, your medical experiences, volunteer work, noteworthy club positions, and academic accolades are going to outrank this in the W&A. But you have fifteen unique entries to fill, and you want to show different dimensions of yourself. We believe a hobby is a must in a W&A. Read our blog post dedicated to hobbies. 

Related: 

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Clinical Experiences that Medical Schools Love

Your Work & Activities Section Series

Your Work & Activities Section: Two Problems You Don't Really Have

"Help, I have too many experiences!" 

We've heard it before: "How am I going to keep this at 15 entries? I have 20 options." Here's the thing, you probably don't. You can and should bundle certain activities. Doing so reduces repetition and allows you to include a wider variety of experiences. Say, you were secretary of your student council for one year and vice president for two—that's material for one entry. Even if one of those roles produced one of your Most Meaningful experiences, you can likely cover both in one write-up.

"Help, I Don't Have Enough Experiences!" 

You may insist: "I have had three clinical experiences, two volunteer posts, and was in one club in college. I don't have 15 options!" 

Here's the thing, you probably do. Did you take a weekend long improv class with some friends? It might have teased out a braver you or helped you to think on your feet. Do or did you have a non-medical job? Obviously, you're going to include all medical work or volunteering experiences as well as impressive internships or jobs in any industry. But even working as an office temp, swiping cards at the college food court, and ringing up retail at the local bookstore exemplifies your work ethic and commitment. It also implies that you're not spoiled. Facts are facts: A lot of med school applicants are privileged. Earning your own money can set you apart because it shows personal responsibility and that you know how to balance work and studying. 

Hobbies count too. It is not a waste of space to share that you're an artist or love to garden. You can angle these activities to be more relevant to your application by explaining what transferable qualities—creativity, dedication, patience—you can apply to medicine. Your hobby write-ups also can highlight different strengths than your other entries, have a passionate delivery, and show some personality. 

"No, I really don't have enough experiences."

If you don't have enough experiences, now is the time to get them. Put together a group to clean up tree pits in your neighborhood to practice leadership. Take a hip-hop dance class to become less stiff and stern. If you're interested in mental health, volunteer for a crisis hotline. Exercising empathy and learning to talk to people on the worst days of their lives is useful for a future physician. Last-minute shadowing experiences are an option, too. They in no way should replace clinical experiences, but, if you are light on clinical experience or want to get some career goal-related shadowing experiences in, this is the ticket. Attending a conference or volunteering at a community health fair are one-day events that can lead to impactful encounters. Pursuing and sharing education is very valuable to medical schools.

Your Work & Activities Section: Where to Begin

To improve your W&A writing experience and the quality of your entries, try this: 

Raid your brainstorm. As we’ve frequently mentioned, your brainstorm serves every part of your application process. If you're having a hard time with W&A entries, copy and paste info directly from a brainstorm bucket or two and cut and sew together the first draft of an entry from that material.

One client began a W&A entry on her time as an EMT by briefly sharing salient details about things she did and skills she acquired while working on an ambulance. She then copied (literally control-C) a poignant story from her brainstorm's ah-ha bucket wherein she showed compassion for a patient who had miscarried. She pasted it directly into her W&A draft document. She proceeded to trim unnecessary parts of the story (what day it was, what her partner was doing), and add a takeaway about seeing the importance of caring for a patient's mental health.

Start with the easy ones. Do you know what your takeaway was from shadowing a pediatrician? Did working on a poster presentation with a group help you learn to manage conflict? Have you been swimming competitively since you were a guppy? Instead of writing W&A entries in the order of their occurrence or importance, start with whatever comes naturally.

Do a dirty draft—and re-read it later. You don't have to refine your first draft text right away. In fact, we’d recommend that you write all 15 first drafts (that doesn't have to happen in one sitting) and then go back to the entries with fresh eyes later. Sometimes when you're reading one entry repeatedly back-to-back, you see what's in your head and not what is on the page. So, you might think a description makes perfect sense. But later, you'll read it, discover issues, and revise it accordingly.

Craft your stories. You'll always share some basic duties and details; and they can be pretty cut and dry. For example, "At the free clinic, I checked in patients and learned how to take vitals. I interacted with approximately 20 patients during every four-hour shift." But you must also include what you got out of this experience, preferably using an engaging anecdote. "One patient, Linda…" If you don't think you have a specific story to tell, schedule time with an Apply Point consultant and we'll talk things over and find one. You'll be surprised at how much of a story you can fit into 700 characters. But don't worry about going over the word count in your first draft. We're here to help you pare down, if necessary.

Your Work & Activities Section: Before You Start

Before we make a case for the kinds of experiences you should include in your W&A and get into the deep details you should be sharing, we're going to give you three super-basic tips for writing these entries. Bookmark this page and keep it accessible because you are going to want to check that you're doing these three things in each entry that you write.

1. Use complete sentences. This is not a resume. You might have done an activity log when presenting your candidacy to your pre-med committee. That will be an excellent resource, but it's probably not polished, and these entries must be.

2. Go beyond the "what." Don't just describe a job you did. Share details about how this experience challenged, changed, or motivated you. Through anecdotes, show the qualities that medical schools are looking for, which include leadership and critical thinking abilities, empathy, strong communication skills, resilience, intellectual curiosity, and maturity.

3. Utilize your space well. For general entries, you'll have 700 characters with spaces to tell your story. Aim to max out that character count. Each experience should warrant it—700 is not that many characters. For the Most Meaningful entries, you'll have 700 characters with spaces, followed by an additional 1,325 with spaces. If you come up short on either section of the Most Meaningful entries, don't worry about it, so long as you have something compelling in each section.

Your Pre-Med Priorities: How to Find Clinical Experiences for Your Gap Year(s)

If you've already graduated and are taking a gap year or two, you can find summer and full- and part-time pre-med research assistant gigs that require a BA on job boards like Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter, etc. You can find work as a medical scribe in these regular job listings too. EMT programs are a pipeline to EMT jobs, ditto CNA programs to CNA jobs. The Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs maintains a list of accredited paramedic programs. (Just bear in mind that becoming a paramedic is more intense than becoming an EMT.) You can also try the following:

1. Use your club contacts. If you're a member of your college's pre-med club, you have access to some alumni and/or guest speakers who are interested in helping prospective doctors. If they can't let you shadow or work for them because of their schedule or because their specialty doesn't match up with your goals, they may recommend someone for you to contact or even give you an email intro. Go Greek too. If you're a member of a sorority or fraternity, your organization may be able to set you up with a physician alumnus who is eager to help. 

2. Call a volunteer center. Sometimes a cold call is the way to go. Free clinics tend to be understaffed and are therefore aching to be your clinical experience. But they might not have a job posting up online. Call or email them and ask if they need volunteers. For a hospital volunteer center, go with: "I'm a pre-med student at (or recent graduate from) ABC University. I'd love to speak with someone about shadowing a physician and a volunteer position. I'm most interested in X, but I'm open to all opportunities." Academic affiliated hospitals are probably your best bets. 

3. Connect with a local physician for shadowing. Reach out to someone who specializes in an area you're interested in and is hopefully close to campus. (It would be ideal to shadow them multiple times.) You can call or email their office or direct message them on LinkedIn. Younger doctors are going to be more familiar with shadowing because they did it. Ask your own doctor about shadowing too. Yep, you're really hitting up any doctor who you know. 

4. Sign up for virtual shadowing. There are third-party organizations who can hook you up with a virtual opportunity. If you have other, more substantial clinical experiences, this is just going to be a bonus to your application. Virtual shadowing should not be your sole clinical experience. (It can be your sole shadowing experience.) Virtual can be great if you want to follow a physician with a certain specialty and can't seem to lock down a local one. Just remember, virtual group sessions tend to be large, so you're not going to get one-on-one mentorship.

Related:

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Gain Clinical Experiences

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Clinical Experiences that Medical Schools Love

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Finding Clinical Experiences as an Undergraduate

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Finding Clinical Experiences as an Undergraduate

Your school is built to help you find clinical and research experiences, be it through fellowships abroad, local summer internships, or work in the university's research labs. And many prospective medical students use personal connections to land volunteering gigs and shadowing experiences, which is great. Get these however you can… 

But, what do you do if your school isn't automatically flooding you with information on opportunities and your aunt's fiancé isn’t the top brain surgeon in your city? Try this. 

1. Seek out your pre-health advisor and pre-med professors. “[An on-campus pre-health advisor] may be in the academic dean’s office, a science professor, or a counselor in the career services office,” says AAMC. If you don’t know of an advisor on your campus, you can find out if there is one through the National Association of Advisors for the Health Professions (NAAHP) database. No advisor on campus? Contact the NAAHP to find a volunteer advisor. Can your advisor or a pre-med professor help you connect with someone at your university's medical school so that you can help in a lab or at an affiliated hospital? Can they give you the contact info of a physician alumnus who you can shadow? Your advisor and professors are motivated to help you; they want your application to be a success. You just might have to be the one who makes the first move. 

2. Hit up your school's medical school and science department. Same DIY deal. If, for whatever reason, your pre-health advisor isn't available to you, go ahead and contact these folks yourself. It shows initiative and you could make valuable connections on the administrative teams. 

3. Check out the Student Doctor Network's Activity Finder. We're big fans of SDN, a nonprofit, and overall terrific resource. Their Activity Finder is a one-stop shop that will guide you towards NIH and other research opportunities, volunteering gigs with Americorps and more, virtual shadowing experiences, and clinical work by location and position. 

4. Check other online listings—for research opportunities, especially. Besides SDN, some university websites have databases of summer research opportunities at both their college and others. (You don't have to go to a certain school to work at it. We had a client who went to UConn do her summer research at Yale.) And definitely peruse AAMC's database of summer research opportunities for undergraduates. 

Related:

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Gain Clinical Experiences

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Clinical Experiences that Medical Schools Love

Your Pre-Med Priorities: How to Find Clinical Experiences for Your Gap Year(s)

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Clinical Experiences that Medical Schools Love

There are a variety of clinical experiences that medical schools like to see in your W&A section because they inform your understanding of a medical career and the day-to-day work it entails.

They include: 

Medical Scribe: This is one of our favorite types of clinical experience. Working as a scribe allows you to see doctor patient interactions up close; you'll expand your medical vocabulary, read about things touched on in appointments (there's that intellectual curiosity!), and be a valuable part of a medical team. You can scribe at a top hospital or a CityMD clinic. What matters is exposure. Don't just describe the job to the school (they know what it is); share a meaningful story. 

EMT: You'll learn basic life support (BLS) and work in high-pressure scenarios. We had a client who worked as an EMT, and performed CPR on a patient, tag teaming with an experienced colleague so neither would become too fatigued and lag in compressions. Their persistence paid off; their patient survived. As an EMT, you'll have opportunities to help people and maybe even save lives. You can learn a lot from your colleagues, too. They've seen it all. 

Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA): This job will require a 4-to-16-week state-approved training program at a local community college or through the Red Cross. It will also involve major grunt work. You'll be responsible for multiple patients, taking their vitals, making sure they're moving, eating, and drinking water. You'll work closely with a medical team. You don't have to work full-time, and the hours are flexible. It's also a paid gig, and actual clinical jobs can look more impressive than volunteering. 

Free Clinic Volunteer: You'll interact with patients, doctors, and other medical professionals while providing care essential to your community. You'll meet patients with a variety of medical needs, and your entry about working at the free clinic should be about direct patient interaction. (You need at least one patient-interaction in your W&A.) Runner up for the best entry focus is a learning experience you had with a staff member. Showing yourself as a problem-solver is great. 

Research Jobs with Clinical Exposure: A twofer! You'll learn about one area of medicine in-depth and get to know patients. As a hospital research coordinator, one client became a passionate advocate for sickle cell disease (SCD) patients' health and dignity. Through surveying patients at every appointment, he developed strong bonds with them and their families. He learned about the daily trials of the disease and the stigma surrounding its most common treatment: opioids. Hospital staff often treated patients in extreme pain as drug-seekers. One 19-year-old told our client: "I just want to be respected." It affected our client deeply. His involvement in this clinical research project spurred him to join two studies investigating new SCD drug treatments. 

Shadowing: Shadowing is great introductory clinical exposure and prevalent among applicants—88% of Johns Hopkins' 2018 accepted students had shadowing experience. But to med schools, shadowing weighs less than volunteering at free clinics, doing clinical research, or working as a medical scribe, etc. That's because it typically doesn't lead to significant patient interactions. Still, shadowing someone in a field you're very interested in is informative, and you can have poignant experiences. 

Since patient interaction isn't common in these scenarios, you want to emphasize how else a shadowing experience helped you build clinical skills or expanded your knowledge of a medical specialty, preferably one you're interested in pursuing after medical school. If these things don't apply to your shadowing experience, here are some other things to consider: What did you see—and how did it affect you? Did a doctor calmly handle an angry patient? Did you seek more information on any condition a physician diagnosed in front of you? Did you learn something about a doctor's day-to-day life that you didn't know before? Unless you had one incredible experience or really need to fill up your W&A, grouping your shadowing experiences in one entry is a great idea.

Related:

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Gain Clinical Experiences

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Finding Clinical Experiences as an Undergraduate

Your Pre-Med Priorities: How to Find Clinical Experiences for Your Gap Year(s)

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Gain Clinical Experiences

The most important W&A entries are about your clinical experiences. Admissions committees need to know: Does this candidate have enough clinical experience to know what they're getting into? 

"You have to have clinical exposure," Keith D. Baker, PhD., assistant dean for admissions at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine told US News & World Report. "That's sort of fundamental. That experience lets us and other medical schools know that you have a reasonable expectation of what lies ahead, and if you don't have that, we simply don't have confidence that you're a serious candidate.” 

Schools need to know that you have seen medical care in action and gained experience with patients. "If you're not interested in working with patients, we're not going to be interested in working with you," Paul White, assistant dean for admissions at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine said in a 2019 interview with Case Western Reserve University's All Access: Med School Admissions podcast. In another podcast interview, this one with Admissions Straight Talk, White reiterated that while applicants might assume Johns Hopkins would favor research roles above all other things, the school wants applicants with clinical exposure (though that can be through their research roles). "Most students who are successful in our admissions process have had significant clinical interaction, and that goes well beyond shadowing," he said. "I’m talking about actually interacting with patients…in a position where they interact on a regular basis." The numbers back him up. Matriculation data for the 2018 entering class at Johns Hopkins showed that 91% had medical or clinical volunteer experiences and 24% had some type of paid medical or clinical employment. 

Jorge A. Girotti, PhD, MHA, and associate dean at University of Illinois College of Medicine, believes that the impact that clinical experience has on an applicant's career goals is the most compelling part of their application. "I feel that it makes sense to postpone applications until you have accumulated at least one year of clinical experiences," he told the AAMC. Taking a gap year to acquire more clinical experience is not looked down upon by medical schools. 

Related:

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Clinical Experiences that Medical Schools Love

Your Pre-Med Priorities: Finding Clinical Experiences as an Undergraduate

Your Pre-Med Priorities: How to Find Clinical Experiences for Your Gap Year(s)