Today, we had a student in one of our consultation sessions who was asking one of our admission
experts what would be the best way in order to make their list of past experiences stand
out. And you know sometimes they call these a Work and Activity section, sometimes
they call them Autobiographical Sketches, sometimes they just call them Lists of Past
Experiences, it doesn't matter what they are but this student, that's a pre-medical student, wants to
know how they could narrow down their lists, they had a list of somewhere around fifty or sixty
activities that they wanted to include, and they wanted to know what would be the best
way to narrow them down in order to be able to make their application stand out. It was a really
good question and I'm gonna tell you exactly how to do that but first in case you haven't
been watching any of our videos I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Behrouz
Momeni, I'm the CEO and founder here at BeMo or BeMo Academic Consulting where we help students
with admissions to highly competitive graduate and professional programs such as application
to medical schools for example and we do this because we believe everyone deserves access
to higher education and normally students who seek our advice and our help it's because they
either want to make sure that they put in their best foot forward so that they can avoid that
dreaded rejection letter and the time and money and energy that comes with it or they have been
unsuccessful in the past and they want to make sure that they don't repeat the mistakes they
made in previous application cycles. Now going back to our question of how to make your List of Past
Experiences stand out, there's a couple of things you could do in fact I think there was about four
or five steps that I have here on my screen so if you see me cheating it's because I'm looking at my
screen to make sure I tell you about all those five things that we normally teach our students.
And if you do this not only that you reduce the number of different activities that you're going
to include, but actually it is gonna help you to make your application stand out so what are they.
First of all, it goes without saying wherever you're applying make sure you follow their
instructions at all times and the next thing that you have to think about is when you're looking at
your list of activities you have to make sure that each entry you include you make sure it's
concise it's very clever in the way that you're introducing the experience, and I'm going to tell
you exactly what you have to do, and you have to also use some creativity so don't be
afraid to use your creativity to make explain the different experiences. Again you have a not
only that you have a limited number of spots for different activities, for each activity you also
have a very limited amount of space to include some text to describe them. So use concise clever
and creative language. And now the next thing you have to do again I'm just a glancing at my
screen just to make sure I don't miss any of the points and this one is really important you have
to make sure that any activity that include shows both progression and commitment. So what I mean by
progression and commitment so let's say you were a lab assistant a laboratory assistant in your first
year of undergrad and after a year the supervisor or the professor realized that you're really good
so they hired you instead of as a volunteer now they actually hire to pay you to do a summer
research project then after that because it went really well maybe they allowed you
to go on a conference and they allowed you to present your studies then they asked you then
the following year to come back again and work again on a paid project where you continued the
project and eventually you had a publication and a conference presentation. So you'll notice what
I'm saying by progression so you started from a position where it was a volunteer position and
you slowly went through the steps and eventually you had a publication out of it, that shows clear
progression. Coincidentally it also shows commitment. What do I mean by commitment? So
what admission offices normally like to see is whether or not you're choosing really meaningful experiences or
were you just hopping from one experiences to another just to fill out your application.
And someone who is not genuine of course will do this but someone who is genuine about the
experiences that they're sharing, you will see that they have committed to that experience instead of
just a few weeks or months sometimes years of commitment. So the next thing you gotta look at is
when you're narrowing down your list is make sure that you only include activities where you have
committed a significant amount of time unless it was something that was really significant
and it was not possible to dedicate and number of years to it for example. If she's sharing shadowing
a doctor normally it's not gonna last years it's usually weeks or months. So again of course
I'm generalizing but use your discretion but I want to give you some guidelines. The fourth sort of
piece of advice that we always give our students is that we ask them to demonstrate the essential
qualities admissions officers are looking for. So when you go into any medical school's mission
statement or their admissions criteria or even better if you go to their governing bodies website
for example on AAMC you will be able to see the core competencies that medical schools are all
looking for. So it's important for you to show those qualities through your experiences now I
am saying show instead of tell so you don't want to put in some adjectives beside every
descriptor rather you want to choose activities that would allow the admissions officers to be
able to form those specific adjectives on their own just by reading the experiences that you have
included. So this could be for example leadership, teamwork, compassion, community service, commitment
to scientific discovery, etc. etc. So again that's another way for you to narrow down your list of
activities lastly it goes without saying this was obviously clear I think this was the message from
the beginning, it's really important that you focus on quality rather than quantity. That's probably
the first sort of a mind shift you have to work on even though you have had a lot of different
experiences the first thing you got to think about is that this is not about quantity you
know, admission officers don't even have time to be able to read the entire experiences you
might be including so be very careful with what you include and narrow down based on the
tips that I just provided for you. Now I wanted to also mention something because since I've
been posting these videos we've gotten a lot of messages either on Facebook or through our website
contact form from students and saying whether or not we help students with the application process
because a lot of students know we are famous for CASPer preparation, interview preparation, and MMI
preparation, but some students have were not aware so we got some messages asking us whether we help
students and we definitely do we have multiple different programs for application review programs
we are going to include a link either below this video or somewhere around this video you're gonna
see a link where you could go on the page and read about the different programs we have and
if you're interested you could press the enroll now button and enroll right now so that it could
secure your spot before we reach full capacity. The other alternative is we could go into our contact
form and send us a message and request the free initial consultation this way one of our admission
experts will get in touch with you in order to schedule a session and then later on they will go
through the different programs we have, answer any questions you may have in order to be able to plan
a personalized course of action and get you moving as soon as possible. Now if you like this video as
much as I enjoyed making it for you go ahead and share it with someone who may enjoy it, if you have
any questions of course put your questions in the comment section and one of us will get back
to you as soon as possible. Thanks again for watching and hopefully I'll talk to you soon!