One of the best ways to make your med school application stand out is through polished essays that capture your journey to a career in medicine. In a previous post, we discussed the Personal Statement and detailed the different requirements of the three US med school application platforms: AMCAS for MD programs, AACOMAS for DO programs, and TMDSAS for MD and DO programs in Texas. Here, we’ll focus on the Activity Essays for these platforms.
Unlike the Personal Statement, which requires you to weave several experiences into a coherent narrative with a unified theme, each Activity Essay focuses on a single extracurricular activity and its impact on you. These activities can include both science-related extracurriculars (including clinical experiences, shadowing, and research) as well as additional activities (such as athletics, artistic endeavors, and non-medical employment and community service) that provide opportunities for leadership and teamwork.
Each of the three med school application platforms has different requirements for the Activity Essays, including the number of activities you can describe, the length of each description, and the categories you can choose from. Below, we guide you through what to expect.
AMCAS
The AMCAS application (for MD med schools) allows you to describe up to 15 activities (including work, extracurriculars, and honors), each with a maximum of 700 characters. You can designate up to three of these as your Most Meaningful activities, which grants you an additional 1325 characters each to work with.
You’ll be asked to select the category that best describes each activity from a drop-down menu of 19 Experience Types:
- Artistic Endeavors
- Community Service/Volunteer – Medical/Clinical
- Community Service/Volunteer – Not Medical/Clinical
- Conferences Attended
- Extracurricular Activities
- Hobbies
- Honors/Awards/Recognitions
- Intercollegiate Athletics
- Leadership – Not Listed Elsewhere
- Military Service
- Other
- Paid Employment – Medical/Clinical
- Paid Employment – Not Medical/Clinical
- Physician Shadowing/Clinical Observation
- Presentations/Posters
- Publications
- Research/Lab
- Social Justice/Advocacy
- Teaching/Tutoring/Teaching Assistant
We feel that the most important categories for med school admissions are patient exposure (either Paid Employment – Medical/Clinical or Community Service/Volunteer – Medical/Clinical), Physician Shadowing/Clinical Observation, Research/Lab, Community Service/Volunteer – Medical, and Community Service/Volunteer – Not Medical/Clinical. If multiple categories apply, we recommend varying the Experience Types you choose in order to hit these most crucial areas.
Descriptions. For the shorter Description paragraphs (of up to 700 characters), describe your unique responsibilities, accomplishments, qualities, skills, and impact. Given the character count, concision is vital! For the non-Most Meaningful activities, include one or two sentences at the end of the 700-character description about why the activity was meaningful to you.
Most Meaningful. For the longer Most Meaningful paragraphs (of up to 1325 characters), write more expansively about how this activity impacted you. What did you learn—about yourself, about medicine, or about the type of physician you would like to be? How did you grow as a person, scholar, researcher, and/or future physician? How did the experience shape your academic or career goals?
AACOMAS
The AACOMAS application (for DO med schools) has separate sections for Experiences (work and activities) and Achievements (honors). Unlike on the AMCAS application, there is no limit on the number of experiences. But the entries are shorter: each has a 600-character limit, and there’s no equivalent of the longer Most Meaningful essays.
Experiences. The Experiences section of the AACOMAS application offers six possible categories:
- Extracurricular Activities
- Non-Healthcare Employment
- Healthcare Experience
- Research
- Teaching Experience
- Non-Healthcare Volunteer or Community Enrichment
(If you’re unsure about how to categorize an experience, you can always contact a particular DO program!)
Achievements. The AACOMAS application also has five categories for achievements, including awards, honors, presentations, publications, and scholarships.
TMDSAS
Current Activities. The TMDSAS application (for both MD and DO programs in Texas), like the AACOMAS application, does not limit the number of activities you can list. But most of these descriptions are much shorter than allowed by the other two platforms, with a limit of 300-500 characters for each.
The TMDSAS application has eight categories to choose from: Academic Recognition, Non-Academic Recognition, Extracurricular Activities, Leadership, Employment, Research Activities, Healthcare Activities, and Community Engagement. In certain instances, activities may be repeated in more than one category:
- A paid, healthcare-related position can be included in both Employment and Healthcare Activities
- If any of your activities includes a leadership role that you assumed, you can include it under both Leadership and the other category it would fall under. For example, if you were president of a school club, you could include that under both Leadership and Extracurricular Activities.
Descriptions for activities that fall under Academic Recognition, Non-Academic Recognition, and Employment are allowed 300 characters, while the descriptions for Extracurriculars, Leadership, Healthcare, Community Engagement, and Research Activities are allowed 500 characters.
For three “top meaningful activities” that you choose, you are granted an additional 500 characters to expand on the descriptions. For any Research Activities that culminated in a publication, abstract, presentation, or poster, you also have an additional 500 characters.
Planned Activities. Unlike AMCAS and AACOMAS, TMDSAS has a separate section for Planned Activities, in which you can describe activities that do not begin until after the application deadline.
Applying to medical school is a complicated process, and writing the required essays is no exception! Please contact Collegiate Gateway if you would like guidance on any aspect of the application and admissions process. As always, we’re happy to help!