AMCAS Work & Activities: How to Write 15 Experiences + 3 Most Meaningful (MD/PhD Admissions Advice)

(soft music) - This is Jack Weston's pre-med admissions podcast, helping you get accepted with Dr. Anita Paschol. - We are so, so, so excited to welcome here to our Amcast and Experiences episode of our podcast. My name's Molly Kilti. I'm actually the director of instruction here at Jack Weston. I work mostly on the Amcast side of things. I'm so excited to introduce Dr. Anita Paschol because she is literally like one of my heroes. She is so, so cool. If you guys have not met her yet, you will soon and you will be, you know, changed for the better. Okay, Dr. Paschol is phenomenal. She's MD double PhD. She'll let that sink in for a moment. Okay, MD double PhD. With more than 30 years of admissions experience, okay, she is an absolute powerhouse. And Anita, I'm gonna give you the floor. I'm so excited for today. - Let's do it, okay. - Do it. There is so much information coming today. And if you've joined me for our prior to podcast, we first talked about kind of the overall application cycle and everything about it. And then last week we focused on personal statements. And honestly, the reason I did that one before this one is everybody who comes to me is so a wigajig about, oh my gosh, I gotta have the perfect personal statement. But I think you guys are gonna figure out today that your personal statement will give them an essence of who you are, but it is 5,300 characters for a reason. And the truth is, is that your experiences, we always say, show, don't tell. Your personal statement lets you tell them a little bit. Your experiences are gonna be where you truly show it. And I find year after year after year, people crash and burn on this, what is probably one of the most pivotal pieces of your application, because your GPA and your MCAT are gonna get you through the screen. How we talked about, there are about 10,000 applicants at every school for three to 500 interviews for 100 slots. You're literally looking at a one in 100 chance of getting that acceptance. And so much of that lies on your experiences. It's how you enter them. It's what you say, it's what you articulate. And I want to cover all aspects of that today to give you examples of what you need to know. Because by now, with applications opening less than three months from now, you should have already dialed in what your experiences were. Aria have an estimate of hours where you are with. And I get people year after year after year, who get to this point with these beautiful GPAs and MCATs and are like, oh my God, I'm missing that and that and that. And there's not time between now and May. And people are like, well, could I add them right now? And I will tell you, having sat on eight different medical admissions committees and over the past 35 years sat on constant admissions committees, I can tell you our standpoint is, you've had a lifetime at least four years to pull this application together, to put all of the last points in in two to three months, shows that you're not really ready. So how do we avoid that? And that's what I want to try to help you guys figure out today. So what I am reflecting to you today is really based on my years of experience in and as a part of adcoms, what we look for and the format we're looking at. All right, so let's just overall talk about the AMCAS work and activities, what we call our experiences at a glance. These really only differ dramatically from Akamas. The category is different, but it's just Akamas gives you 600 characters versus 700. So if you're applying to both, it is perfectly fine to build your AMCAS and then just cut those down by the 600 characters of what we need. So let's just start in general with talking about what you get. We all know this, you get 15 experiences and you're gonna get 700 characters, which is about 100 to 200 words to describe what you did in those experiences. There is a character limit for a reason and it includes spaces. The other thing I need to tell you is, again, there's a strict character count. You can type all that in there as long as you want to. It'll just let you keep on going, but when it prints it out, what you're gonna get is 700 characters or less. It's gonna cut you off. You are going to get out of these 15, three that you're gonna designate as most meaningful. Ideally, we would love to see those be something like maybe a clinical, maybe a research if you've got solid research as well as a service oriented. That's a good sort of thought of what would, because generally what we're going for is something you've done clinically and ideally something that you've done in a service endeavor is probably gonna be most meaningful, but it should be something that you've dedicated time to and has impacted your journey. So here is a clear note. If you have less than 12 experiences, you go through, you list everything out, you put it with categories, and you have less than 12 experiences, and that is less 12 or less combining all your shadowing into one category and having no more than one hobby, one award and one publication, and that's even stretching it, you may not be ready. Do a serious gut punch, okay? We are also looking for something if, you know, what you've done that has really transformed what you've done. Couple of technical details. In your experiences, if you've done things where you've come back multiple times, maybe every summer you've done something, you've been a TA for maybe a semester, one semester, and then the following year or whatever. Amcas actually lets you put up to four different reoccurring role times. So maybe like fall semester, spring semester, or summer, summer, summer, you can actually break those apart versus like making it look like it's a continual thing. If every summer you return to a job, you're obviously not gonna list it from a summer all the way through the years and ongoing. So that's good to know. One of the biggest areas where I see people make mistakes is that Amcas allows you what we call completed and anticipated hours. We're going to talk about that in more detail, but key things, publications, honors and awards, conferences and presentations cannot be anticipated. I don't care if you've got a publication under review and you anticipated it's gonna come out in October. You cannot list it with an October anticipated date and all of those are always zero hours. It's another reason I kinda downplay that side because when you're looking at things that we judge, so to speak, on length of time, number of hours and engagement, a bunch of things with zero hours could kinda throw us off. One last thing, Amcas gets this content as plain text, okay? So you want to avoid, I see it all the time. People have bolded, they put stuff in italics, they put all kinds of bullets, they ain't gonna show up. You might as well just walk away. All right, dashes will show up, but bullets, hyphens, italics and bolded text will not show up. All right, so those are some of our basic nuggets. All right, how do I even start? I mean, like, I think people get really intimidated about this. What do you do before you sit to write, before you do anything? This is what I tell my folks to do starting in November. It's why I love to get applicants the year before because if we're missing any of these things, I've got time to address it. But I like for my students to start at least by November and I've said this again and again. We always say dedicate six months to the MCAT. Dedicate six months to putting your primary application together. So I have my folks start in November and you do an inventory. You go category by category. AMCAST gives you 19 total categories, which is a lot. Now, okay, wait a minute, 15 experiences, 19 categories. Are you gonna use them all? No, of course you're not. But do an inventory, okay, because remember I told you, if you've attended my other webinars, we literally get a grid of every AMCAST category, length of time, number of hours, how you name that experience. So it's gonna give us a grid of what you've done, okay? So the first thing is go and write everything that you've done, okay? If you're having to combine activities, maybe college events or maybe you've got a lot of community service with your sorority, that's multiple things and you combine it into one category. If you're having to combine to get down to 15, that's a great sign. If you're trying to extrapolate and you're like scratching your head and going, can I put this one in? You may need to do a gut check, okay? Because as I've told you, you don't want to be a reapplicant. So list everything you've done, then list the dates, list the hours and what category you're gonna think you're gonna put it in and be reflective. Then start to combine similar experiences to sort of get you into there. And a perfect example I give of this is I always want my people to combine shadowing into one category. Now we know that we're typically looking at shadowing events in terms of primary, specialty, indigent, underserved care and international healthcare. So if you were going to title a shadowing experience, how you're gonna name it, you might say clinical shadowing and then primary specialty. the indigent care. Then when you do that description, you break it out by your shadowing and then give a blurb on it, okay? So think about everything you're gonna do. We're gonna go through all the categories in a bit, and I'm gonna show you exactly in a movie of tips for how to write them out. Then think about which one of these are gonna be your one to three most meaningful. Oh, here's another thing. I better see three most meaningful. I can't tell you the number of rejection reviews where I've done where there was one most meaningful. And I'm like, so let me get this straight. You're applying to med school. You've done all of this stuff. I got all these experience. The only one was particularly meaningful. I'm gonna give you 1,325 extra characters to talk about what you've done. Then you better find three things and give them to me. Be very, very careful about calculating your dates and your hours, okay? And you can kind of round all of this is on the honor system. So we are expecting you to be forthright in those. I had a girl a couple of years ago, put 4,000 hours for every single experience. I was like, really, let's be realistic. Do you want them to eliminate you? Are you asking them to call your experience people? Because you need to be realistic in your reflections. All right, so let's get into the nuts and bolts of this 'cause that's just all the basic over taught sort of stuff. Let me give you the goodies. All right, so let's go to the descriptions first, okay? You've got 700 characters. And people try to balance two different aspects of this. First of all, avoid the knee jerk of every single description, the same thing I told you in your primary in your personal statement. Run from the word I, okay? I don't know how often I read descriptions and every freaking description is, I did this, I did that, I went here, I went there, okay? You've got to help your reader who is evaluating your experiences. You know what the heck you are doing, okay? So let's say I'm in a research lab and my title has been research assistant, R-A, the Munchenhausen lab, studying whatever, okay? The very first part out of your description should tell me what it is and where it was. A short statement to either name the organization, name the mission, name who you're serving. So for instance, at Sunnyville Retirement Center, a step down unit for I worked as a, okay? So tell me what it is. Then in the next line, tell me your seat at the table, specifically what you were responsible for in this position. But I'm going to tell you, avoid the knee jerk response of writing as a, oh by the way, avoid that as much as you can. You can have one or two as a roles, but please don't give me all of them. This is the place as a idea. Don't be so robotic, but also don't just give me a laundry list. As an MA, I was responsible for and then use your 700 characters to tell me everything an MA does. I'm pretty sure I know what an MA does. You've got to put it into context, tell me your role, tell me what you did, okay? But then the most important part in those 700 characters is the outcome achieved and how you grew from it. And in that, we are truly looking at reflections of the core competencies. So you've got to balance that though. We know the core competencies. I've already told you two of the schools I review for literally have me sit down with everyone's work and activities and the core competencies and see if I see them articulated in those descriptions. But please don't just list those same core competencies again. I, over and over, I'll see improved my time management, my communication skills, my scientific reasoning, and my teamwork capabilities. And then the next one will say, improve my communication, my teamwork capabilities. You look like a broken record and it immediately diminishes the impact of your activities. We're going to go through those and you're going to see how we play them out. So here are STEM sentences that you can copy from. And I don't mean directly copy from. It's a thought process. At the organization, I already told you, at Sunnyville Retirement Home, I served as a MA, where I, what you did, through this role or through overcoming such and such, I achieved this strengthened my, who it was, what you did, something that you kind of an accomplishment, a goal, something you ever came, and then how you grew from this. If it was a leadership thing, you would say, as A. And again, I told you, you can use a couple of those. Just don't, don't give them to me in 15. As a TA, who taught in such and such, I developed such and such. I learned how to. These templates give you a basic structure. And it's like a 2, 2, 2, 2, is what I say. Two sentences, two sentences, two sentences, two cover. Who, what, when, where, growth? All right. Let's get some real world examples. All right. Each of these, as you can see, I've kind of maxed out my characters. And again, you don't have to go to 700. But if everything is four to 500 characters, it sort of says to me, did you really grow from this? So let's see this principle that I just talked to you about in action. And I don't typically read from slides, but this is where I want to read from this slide. Let's give a clinical volunteering example. As an emergency department volunteer, ED, if you're saving for characters, you could have put emergency department up in your top, emergency department volunteer, and the ED for the abbreviation. And here, if you needed the characters, you could have just said as an ED volunteer. But we had the characters. As an emergency department volunteer at County Hospital. So I know what you were, and I know where it was, and the area you were at. Now we're moving into your role. I supported a level one trauma center that puts it into context of, is this a little tiny hospital or where it is serving 60,000 patients annually. So you get the size of it. Assisting with patient transport, restock supplies, and provided comfort to have active tents in what you're doing. But then an outcome. When a non-English speaking family struggled to understand discharge instructions, I coordinated with interpretation services and created a visual guide. We see a problem. We see your role and how you stepped in that they could use at home. Then how did you grow from it? My time in the ED taught me that medicine extends beyond diagnosis. Not just I learned how to better communicate and, and then your reflection. It requires cultural humility, resourcefulness, and the ability to meet patients where they are. Further developing my skills here we're getting your growth and the core competencies. My skills in crisis communication as I learned to remain calm under pressure. 692 characters that told us everything and took us there. And we knew what you did. And then I'm going to shift my stuff over here. Let's talk about a research example. Investigating novel by O-Markers for Early Alzheimer's Detection in Dr. Chen's Neuroscience Lab. What you did, where it was, what the lab was. I processed cerebrospinal fluid samples, performed Eliza essays, and analyzed protein expression data using statistical modeling. Not a long list. I pipaeted. I did this. I did that. It's four to five key things you did. Then we're going to solve a problem. When our preliminary results showed unexpected patterns, I designed additional cortisol control experiments that revealed unknown confounding variables that ultimately strengthened our findings. So I now know you took an active role in figuring something out rather than just telling me you learned scientific process or whatever throwing words at me, you demonstrated. Again, demonstrate. Don't just tell. Through time in my work is now contributing to a manuscript currently under review. Remember I already told you we can't list publications coming in the future. But now you're alluding to in your discussion that you're going to be published, OK, without even doing a citation. Through time in the lab, I developed scientific thinking capabilities, learn to embrace setbacks as learning opportunities, and gained appreciation for how basic research can transform patient care decades later. So you've shown a realization of bench top to bedside without just saying that. Again, 697 characters used to the max. All right. Why are we not moving? All right. So now we're going to go to the most meaningful 1,325 characters. I would really like for you guys to think about this as H-Cart. This is how I remember it. And each one is a structure for this. If you remember when we talked about your personal statement, it has a format as well. We talk about going from the catch to three to five different paragraphs to a conclusion. We're doing the exact same thing here on a smaller scale. We're going to hook to catch them. We're going to give them three to four meaningful things, and then I'm going to give them a reflection in 1,325 characters. Cardinal rule number one. Please do not repeat what you just told me in the description. Okay, do not basically tell me this lab and your role and what you did. You already told me that once. I don't need it again. So the first is hook the scene. Start with a concrete moment. I love a story when you put this in here. A lot of people will try to throw a story into a description and that is possible. But the description because it's so limited, I really need to get the meat from it. This is the whole purpose of a most meaningful give me an interaction, give me something that happened in your whatever that most meaningful is. Give me something, a scenario, a scene, a story that made that particularly impactful. Then I want to know the conflict, the challenge, the growth and activity, something that is kind of creating a moment so that this story gains depth. I'm going to give you an example in just a second. Then most importantly, are your role in this? What actions did you take as a part of this meaningful experience? Then reflect back on it. How did it change your values, your understanding, and then tie it forward? How is this going to impact you as a future physician? How is it added to your competencies? Be that your cultural humility, your competencies, your scientific reasoning, your ability to communicate whatever it is. That is our conclusion. Okay. So, I'm going to move this over here. All right. Let's give you an example of what that initial catch would be. Then we're going to go through the homeless meaningful and you'll see how we H-CART directly through that. Su clutched her chest as she looked past me, her eyes darting toward the clinic at it exit despite my careful explanation of her diabetes management plan. She nodded and quickly left with prescriptions that she would never fill. As her health educator at the community wellness clinic, I realized our medical advice meant nothing if we did not first address the barriers our patients faced. That is a hugely impactful small statement. I've got a visual. I know what she does and already in just one sentence. I have reflected on her growth and her ability. It pulls us into the moments. Okay. And we know that the writer goes on to explain what is happening here. So, let's go into the rest of that statement and see where we went. So, this is her first statement that we've already talked about. So, how does she go from that into the rest of the cart? This is where she explains that. After her visit, I asked her a nurse, Su, why asked our nurse, why Su always rushed out. And we learned she was rotating her ins rationing her insulin, working two jobs, choosing between bus fare and groceries. With Su's permission, I partnered with a social worker to enroll her in a medication assistance program, connected her to a food pantry with diabetic friendly options, and scheduled follow up around her shifts. I wrote her plan in plain language, added paragraphs for dosing and used teach back until she could explain it clearly. This is a hugely packed information guidance. We identify the problem. We show her direct action. We listed the very concrete things she did, and most importantly, we showed how the outcome came. Now we've got to be reflective. We've got her action. How did she grow from this? These lessons I now carry into every encounter, calling pharmacies for lower cost alternatives, arranging interpreters, building a resource guide for housing, transportation, and nutrition support, actionable items. Notice how I've limited the overuse of I, even though she's doing a lot of I related things. It is very direct actionable things without specifically saying very boring stuff. We see concrete actions that she has taken. When Su returned with an updated glucose log in a steadier voice, I understood that patient education is not a script. That is a very powerful statement of where she has grown and learned. Now how is she going to use it in the future? It is a relationship, advocacy, and humility, and it is the difference between instructions given and care received every single day. She has reflected on something that she knows she will use in the future without directly saying, "As a future physician or from this experience I learned, those are the key things I see. Everybody starts with I did or as a or in this role or this experience taught me or as a future physician. Again, completely fine to use one search wise. But please do not beat me to death with it every single time because I can tell you if I'm reviewing your experiences and I see the same thing over and over and over again, I'm going to tune it out. Alright, moving on, are we ready? Let's go into specifics. I want to go through the different AMC categories and help you understand how you would write them. Now the first thing I've already told you is that I like to combine shadowing into a single category. If you combine it into a single category, you want to break it out by the different types of care. Primary care, list the physician, and list his specialty. So you might say primary care, family medicine, doctor, doctor, or I always say a pascal MD PhD, OBGYN, A pascal MD PhD. Then you might list specialty care, emergency physician, give me the name, list the different physicians and specialties you have served. Indigent care, you may want to put the indigent care clinic, check clinic, free willy clinic, whatever. And then international can be the place you shadowed or the organization you shadowed at. Then a short statement underneath it, because again, you've only got 700 characters that tells the meaning of what you learn shadowing eight physicians across 320 hours, spanning primary care, cardiology and emergency medicine. I observed and then you can give literally little nuggets. It doesn't have to be a whole story, but can be reflective of what you saw family discussions about end of light care, systemic approaches to diagnoses, as well as continuity of relationships in primary care. You are reflecting that you understand what medicine is about and how these specialties differ. All right, honors and awards again, if if you got enough experiences without an honors and award would leave this out every single time, if you need to reflect on something absolutely fine. But please do not have the honors and award category and title it honors and awards, the importance of how you name your experience. You may want to say goldwater scholarship, honor society and deans list, by the way, I am the please don't give me deans list, but I see people do it all the time. So I threw it in here. But the way I feel about this, you're applying to med school. I hope you were on the deans list at some point in time, but dedicate one line per award and do not assume we know what it is. So use your characters to explain what you were awarded or what you achieved. Again, remember I told you no italics, no bolding, no all caps. You can use a dash here because dashes will typically convey in plain text. So goldwater scholarship, tell what it was, Phi Beta Kappa, what you were honored into and how it's recognized. And if you choose deans list, but if at all possible, I say avoid putting deans list, we know you should be on your deans list. Research is a big one. Okay. How do we break out research? I generally want to know the lab and what you were studying and then what you achieved. Please avoid generic task list. Okay. And it is very important to say how you contributed to the project. I love to hear people talk about how they overcame an issue, anything that's upcoming, like if you're contributing to manuscripts or presentations, etc. Also use this as an opportunity if you taught or trained other people in the lab because that demonstrates teaching and tutoring. And if you did your own independent project, okay, something that you did on your own because also indemnifies leadership. For example, examining how microbiocompassitions affect immune response and inflammatory bowel disease using mouse models, I performed what you did. Okay. So we understand the research and we understand what you did bacterial DNA extraction RNA sequencing bioinformatics. Be careful with this because we want to have professional speaking, but you don't want to definitely you don't want to think. That your audience necessarily knows what you're talking about. I always say nobody cares about your research, but you and that's not really true. But you understand people get they dedicate so much time to their research and they think everybody else has that same level of enthusiasm. Wet my interest for it without boring me to death with too much technical jargon. Okay. Here's the key thing though, the problem solving. when initials are done. data showed high variability, I implemented more rigorous sterile technique and redesigned our housing protocol, reducing noise by 40%. We show how you addressed a problem and how we got an outcome. It also referencing co-authoring a publication. You may not have that space for it. Then this work taught me scientific rigor, creative problem solving and how translational research can bridge bench discoveries to bedside applications. Okay, we've gotten under 650 characters and we told a boatload here. But we didn't go, taught me critical thinking, taught me scientific reasoning, use a wider vocabulary without directly listing because it looks like you were lazy if you did. All right. Now, clinical and non-clinical service, people are always interested in their service and the service is so, so important to emphasize. We generally talked about that we want three to four ongoing service endeavors, reflecting back where we talked about what you're looking for in class. And by the way, next week I'm actually going to break down CLASS. I'm going to talk about the most meaningful things you can get involved in. Well we've already talked about that the average number of service hours is about 450 hours. And we want to split over three to four different things that you do regularly for at least six months for about 50 hours and then you combine them all together. And in your application year when I'm scanning, I want to see ongoing anticipated shadowing, ideally ongoing hands on care. And I want to see at least three, ideally four service things that have anticipated hours going forward. Now when we're talking about the service you've done and I see this all the time, please name the population, name the organization and who you were helping. Okay. That is key. Show genuine engagement in what you did. Okay. So I want to know who it was, the population you served and what you did. If possible, give me one reflective moment. Let's say you're volunteering at a food bank. Okay. And you're packaging and distributing foods in that 700 characters. It can be very simple. Understanding people like Joe who returned each week after being laid off from his job or Sally who was a newly single mom, you know, following the loss of her husband trying to survive. All nuggets take little characters, but let me know you actually engage with people. Then link your outreach to your understanding of how your clinical work extends beyond your walls of your clinic. Perfect example at sunrise assisted living. Who was it? Where? Sunrise assisted living. I provided companionship and activities for memory care residents where 75% of residents had moderate to severe dementia. One line gave me boat loads of information. When Sam became agitated during group activities, I learned to redirect rather than correct using music from his era to ground him in positive memories, discovering how small moments of connection, like hand holding, sharing a laugh, can profoundly impact the quality of life even when a cure is not possible. That one sentence shows he or she gets it from the service she did. She gave me an example. I have a visual of Sam getting agitated. I have a visual of what she actually implemented. My time taught me patience, nonverbal communication and that comfort and dignity can matter as much as treatment. Showed me what she learned, showed me core competencies, what she learned and implied how she will use this as a physician without saying as a future physician. All right. Let's go to leadership and teaching. By the way, we talked about that teaching can be ingrained into your service. It can be part of your research. If you have a specific teaching entry, for example, as an organic chemistry TA or as a tutor, this is how you might want to structure that. Organic chemistry can be a stumbling block for many pre-meds. So as a peer tutor, I proactively developed visual study guides that brought down reaction mechanisms into step-by-step mechanisms. So we show a realization. We talk about what you did and we get an outcome. After student struggle with synthesis problems, I created practices that scaffolded from simple to complex. My students average exam scores improved by 25% and greater than 85% and reported feeling more confident in what they were doing. Huge implications and it indicates that she understands how to teach. Oh, breakdown complicated information for people to understand. What am I going to have to do as a physician? Exactly that. And remember I told you, you'd be the best physician in the world. But if you walk in and go, you fat, you got diabetes, you won't die. Okay. Your patient is not going to listen to you. If you partner with them and you speak with them and you break it down, then they will listen. Okay. Leadership example. Reading as our pre-health society, leading our pre-health society as president, I led a board of eight officers and programming for 200 members. I've got your lead role. I've got the aspect of it. Then you tell me what you did. You redesigned your speaker series. You created mentoring models. And then the outcome, our attendance increased by 40% and surveys showed that people were happy. And this showed me how to effectively lead and to bring people together. Then you're writing of these, think about who, what, when, where. All right. Publications, I'm going to briefly skim over this. Again, 700 characters. One of the things I will tell you is publications will carry the most weight if you are between first and third or fourth author. If you're like ninth author as a committee, we're not impressed by that publication because we figure your name kind of just got stuck on something. And also if you're trying to save characters, one of the things you can do is if there are lots of authors, you can list authors up to you get to your name and then put it all and then allow the space for the rest of the narrative. But make sure you use APA or AMA formatting in listing your publication. And remember, publications cannot be anticipated and they are zero hours. All right. I want to touch on something that people mess up all the time and it is AMCAST completed versus anticipated hours. I'm going to finish up briefly right here and we're going to open for question and answers, but I want to give you this last breakdown. Completed versus anticipated. Completed are the hours up to whenever the activity ended. If it is going through when you apply, it is your submission month. If you submit in May, it ends in May. If you submit June 5th, it ends June 5th. Anticipated hours are afterwards. It can be something you haven't started. Maybe a job that you may not be starting until September or if it's an ongoing activity, completed is your submission month and anticipated starts with the next month. So if it's May for completed, anticipated with start in June. If you submit in June, anticipated is July and it goes until it ends or until you up until August of your matriculation year, if you're going all the way to matriculation. Again, remember, honors and awards, conferences, publications and presentations cannot be anticipated. Do not forget that AMCAST puts everything in plain text. Do not and please do not scream at me. I get these where it's like it all caps trying to emphasize something. Run away. It is, it's push back for us. Okay? Carefully read, check grammar, typos, unclear sentence structure. It undermines your credibility. All right. So plug and play. Opening context. Roll you dead. Impact statement. How you groove. To to to to generally that'll get you your sentence structure. You can get that in 90 to 110 words. I have a 10 point checkpoint that I say you should always go through for your most meaningful. Again, to reiterate, we want a hook. We want tension. I need a challenge, something you changed or hurdle. I want your actions. What you did and how it came then it should be reflective and forward thinking hook something you did, how you did it, how you changed from it and forward thinking. It is very, very straightforward. Real quickly, this is the most meaningful again of what we had already talked about. This is a research one that can be very hard to do. Gel lines should clear protein bands. But instead of faint smears that rendered our months workless and inconclusive. Okay, we've already got a challenge. We're in her lab seeing her face something. As the only undergraduate research assistant in the lab, I know where we are and what we're studying. I face to choice except ambiguous results or investigate where our results were failing. Then she uses two sentences to tell how she come back. added that. So we get everything that she did to fix that outcome, then we get the reflection. What did you learn in the lab? What did it teach you? And then finally, as an aspiring physician, I will bring this same systemic approach. Again, it's plug and play for great outcomes without repeating the same thing. So briefly, here's my 10 point check. Okay. And you should start these six months before by four months in advance, which is where I am right now. I'm revising everybody's experiences. You should be going through this and revising everything the last four to six weeks. You're going back, checking and rechecking, and then it should be polished for when application's opening. So one, is there a clear opening? Do I know what it is and your role? Did I use active voice? Oh, and by the way, if it's ongoing, please talk in the present tense that drives me nuts. Are there specific actions and do we use clear words? I assisted with, I authenticated, I helped use action words. Show the human impact. Make it not general. Who was it impacting and what was your role? But use plain language. Avoid jargon explanations. Explain it in clear English. All right. What's your growth and your takeaway? I better hear something of how you learned and how it reflected the competencies. Is it concise? Does it flow naturally and can I understand it? Please do not repeat from the descriptions into your most meaningful and people always ask me, if I put it in my personal statement, can it be in my experiences? If it was an activity meaningful enough for your personal statement, I hope I see it there. But please don't repeat the same stories. Give me something new because if I hear the same story in the same wording, it makes you look like a one trick pony. Make sure that your days are compliant and they make sense. And then, is it interview ready? Is it perfectly perfected, clean, and spell checked? All right. And the last common pitfalls to avoid, I want you to fall in out. Don't get into the task trap. I did vitals. I escorted patients. I restocked this. I did this. I did this. I did this. I did this. Okay. I don't want just a list of things you do. Also avoid the humble or overinflated response. Be very honest. Okay. Don't falsely downplay your stuff. I was fortunate to be selected, honored to be selected as such and such. But also don't overinflate. Don't look like you just cured the entire world of something. Okay. I single handedly transformed research because you didn't. Again, avoid jargon that people will not understand overly technical terms. Just stops me reading. And please, please do not miss the what? The how it is going to impact you in your future career without just saying as a future physician. All right. Balance. Make sure we've got variety in your 15. You want to appear well rounded. So I'd like to see, I don't want to see eight research, one clinical, one shadowing balance everything out. Even if it means combining stuff. Okay. Prioritize breath. Okay. I'd rather see two years of something sustained than a short little snappy thing. And tell a coherent story. You want your experiences collectively as they come together to show your journey and real roundedness in research and clinical exposure in shadowing and teaching and tutoring. And you're again, I go back to class. I go back to class. I go back to class. I should see clinical leadership academic service and social attributes of you in some type of hobby. All right. Timeline's for success as I told you four to six months. Do your inventory right now eight to 12 weeks before submission. You should be completing all of your drafts for it is six weeks. So by March and April, you should be tightening your language, reading and rereading, but set it aside and come back to it a week later. Two weeks before applications open, you finish and polish one week before submission. And that's the beauty. Amcass opens the first of May. You submit the end of May. Get it all entered and then continue to check and recheck. All right. Your working activities literally as I told you once you get through the screen is your most important part of your application. It is much more than a resume. It is who you are, what you value and who you will become as a physician. It should show empathy. It should show scientific curiosity, humility, leadership, all of the core competencies. I cannot emphasize this enough. We are not only interviewing you for a spot in our med school class. We are looking at how you're going to fit into our med school class and how you're going to be as a future colleague. Are you compassionate and will you deliver excellent care? All right. From here, I want to talk to you guys a little bit about what this whole story says. Okay. We've talked about before I turn it over to our questions real quickly. This is a lot. Okay. And I hope you're excited now to write your experiences because this is your chance to shine. But it's very serious. Okay. What do we talked about? 40% acceptance rate. The average med school gets 10,000 applications for three to 500 interviews, about 4% for 100 slots, a 1% chance of getting in. There are like 500 people with us here today. That means that about 20 at a given school will get an interview for five acceptances. I always say on a great year you apply to 20 schools to get five interviews for one acceptance. This is very different from college. Okay. And constantly I am hearing people trying to source information. Oh, I went to Reddit. Oh, I went to SDN. I'm going to tell you on the med school side, we literally see some of those aspects as the devil because Reddit, SDN aspects of it. Great for basic information, but it's also full of a lot of gunners posting a lot of air and information. Okay. That is one of the things where our academic advisors are people here. When you're looking to schedule a consultation with us, your academic advisor is going to provide you with a very impactful decision-focused opportunity to really evaluate what you have and to create a focus and an attention for how you can impactfully use time from here. Okay. Now, I want you to know when you're talking or scheduling an appointment, which Molly's going to, I'm going to hand back over to you to show you how you could schedule to chat with us. It's not going to be a six session for evaluating and pre-writing your personal statement. It is not going to be a tutoring session. It is going to be a highly impactful session where we're going to analyze and focus on what you need to do. When we talk about writing your personal statement, that's my job. Okay. When you're doing admissions counseling with somebody like me, and I'm going to turn this over, but I am going to tell you one thing about the admissions counseling here at Jack Weston that I oversee and why I've structured our program the way it is. Okay. There are lots of organizations that hire, you know, oh, I've got all of these residents and I've got these doctors who work full time. Okay. Just because you got into med school or just because you're a resident or especially a practicing physician who has been away from this forever does not mean you know how to get into med school. It is about understanding what committees want and how we articulate that. I've been sharing those nuggets from the committee side with you guys all through these. Okay. And that is what I practice here full time one-on-one mentoring where all of your work is completely edited, committee ready, and we work with you collaboratively to deliver that that gives you that insider information. But we've got to know what you bring to the table to be able to make that effective. Amazing. Well, thank you guys all so, so much for coming. Show yourself some love this weekend, whatever that might look like for you. It's a marathon, not a sprint very much. So, one last talk for next week because I have gotten some of you folks to email me and you love the stories. If y'all love stories show up next week because as we go to class, I'm going to give examples of how you could tie your experiences to meet those things. So y'all like story time, come on over. I'll be here. I am sat. I can't wait. Wonderful. Okay. Well, I can't wait to see you guys then. Have a wonderful rest of your Friday and we will see you soon. Bye everyone. Thank you.