You don’t have to submit a resume as a part of your application. What you do have to complete is the experiences or activities section.
For all of your experiences, it’s important to describe what you did in that activity, what core competencies or skills you developed and used, and what you took away from that experience. Space permitting, you might be able to tell a story from that experience, and highlight why it’s been meaningful to your journey to health professions school.
Learn more about how to get involved in experiences here.
What is the experiences section?
You will be able to list activities you’ve participated in during college and provide relevant information including:
- What the experience was/name
- Experience type (for example, volunteer, paid, clinical, research, etc.)
- Total hours involved/dates involved
- Location
- Contact information for someone at that activity who could vouch that you participated
- Experience description
Medical school application specifics
For medical school and the AMCAS application:
- You will be able to list up to 15 experiences you’ve participated in during college
- For 3 of the 15 experiences, you can indicate that they were the most meaningful (on your journey to medical school). You’ll write a longer description (up to 1,325 characters) outlining why it was meaningful.
- The focus for that should be using a story to show why it was meaningful (almost an extension of your personal statement).
- You can talk about the same experiences mentioned in your personal statement, but should highlight different anecdotes from those experiences.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I include experiences I plan to complete in my application year?
- Your application should stand on its own merit with your completed experiences and not rely on those anticipated hours for activities planned during the application year to be strong. If the anticipated activity is critically important to your application, that might be a reason to wait and apply next year when you’ve completed the activity.
- It’s fine to include anticipated hours for activities you’ve already begun and will continue throughout the application year. Be reasonable/honest about how many hours you anticipate completing. It’s always better to underestimate than overestimate and then when you share updates (either at an interview or in an update to the school) you can highlight how you completed more than anticipates.
Should my experiences be bullet points or narrative format?
That’s up to you. Schools don’t prefer one format over the other. Most applications will not allow formatting (like bullet points), but a list or a paragraph is allowed.
If I have a common healthcare job, can I skip the job overview and tell more stories?
While job titles may generally be the same across the country, actual job duties (and their depths) may vary greatly from position to position. Applicants should never assume that schools know exactly what they have been doing based on job title alone and they should always (though briefly) explain their key responsibilities and activities within the designated sections.
Can I include high school experiences?
You should focus on experiences that you participated in during college and beyond. If you started an experience in high school and continued in that experience throughout college, it’s fine to include hours accumulated during high school in the total hour count.
How many experiences do I need?
Quality of experiences is more important than quantity. It’s fine not to fill out all the experiences spots available.
Can I group similar experiences together?
- Yes, that’s a common strategy. For example, you could group all shadowing experiences together and in the experience description list out each experience and hours with each provider. It’s also fine to separate out like-experiences if you want to highlight one as being more meaningful than others.
- As long as you talk about all of your experiences in your application, how you choose to format the experiences isn’t important.