Hi I'm Dr. Lauren Prufer! This week I'm going to be talking about how to write your AMCAS
work and activities sketch. We're going to go step by step through that and then I'm going to debunk
some common myths associated with writing your AMCAS work and activities sketch. So for those
of you who aren't quite sure what the AMCAS work and activities sketch is it's essentially a way for
medical schools to assess your non-cognitive skills. It's a place where you write down your
research experience, your work experience, your extracurricular activities, your volunteer
experience, your leadership experiences, all those things that you do outside of school that have
helped you develop the skills that you need that will one day make you a fabulous physician. Step
1: start early. I cannot emphasize this one enough. There's two components to this. First of all you
need to start volunteering early . So you can submit activities from as early as summer of senior
year. This means you need to start thinking about volunteering as soon as you're getting into your
undergraduate program. So choose those activities start volunteering start some research projects
and start building the skills that you need to get into medical school. Second of all it takes
a long time to write all the descriptors, follow the guidelines, and stay within character limits.
You really want to have high quality descriptors and that requires a lot of proofreading. You don't
want your sketch to reflect poor attention to detail or an inability to follow instructions
which could result in you being rejected from medical school. So take the time start early
get someone else to proofread your sketch for you. Second you need to choose your activities. So here
with our students we really emphasize quality over quantity. A lot of the sketches I see they put in
activities to fill out the 15 slots and didn't really think about what skills they learned or
what the importance of those activities were. You want to be almost surgical with your decision to
include or not include an activity. If they are not you know showing dedication, progression, or
a huge impact on yourself or someone else and they don't show you learning those non-cognitive
skills, then they shouldn't be included. So be really precise and go with quality over
quantity in terms of your activities. Third you want to make titles for your activities. So the
title is less important than the description and it shouldn't take you long to do, there's
basically two things you want include. First of all your role so volunteer or whatever you were
and second of all the name of the organization so you might say volunteer, you know, true eco
corporation. That's your title. Fourth you want to actually write the descriptions. So like I said
the descriptions are 750 characters, that includes spaces. So that's about four to five sentences for
most people. There's four or five main things that you want to include in each description so first
of all the mission of the organization. What is the organization all about. Second what your
role in the organization was. So what did you do? What was your exact role within the organization?
Third you want to talk about the impact you've had on other people. So how did you change
the lives of the people you were working with? Fourth you want to talk about the impact
of the role on yourself. What did you learn from this experience. Finally you can choose to give
a value statement or a statement of importance about the experience. So this is something that's
more generalizable about why you chose to do this volunteer experience in the first place.
This may or may not apply to every descriptor in your sketch it can help to give medical schools
insight into that kind of intrinsic motivation that you possess. So once you've written those
descriptors the next thing you want to do is proofread and proofread and proofread
again! The most helpful thing you can do is to have someone else proofread them for you, make
sure they make sense, catch those little spelling and grammatical errors, and it can be especially
helpful to have professional help with this. You want someone who has experience with AMCAS
sketches, who knows what admissions committees are looking for, and who's going to make sure
that you're within those character count limits and your sketch is absolutely perfect. Finally you
want to be taking a look at those three most important experiences. So I've included a blog
post that goes into more detail in terms of how to actually write out those experiences you can
check that out over on the side but you want to be thinking about experiences that really influenced
your decision to pursue medicine or that really showed the development of those non-cognitive
skills within yourself. So between those two criteria you can choose three experiences
and you want them to be varied and show that you are a well-rounded individual. Next I'm
going to go through some common myths associated with the AMCAS sketch. So the first myth is that
hobby should not be included. So it is okay to include hobbies. You want to be able to show the
admissions community that you are a well-rounded person, that you have a life outside of school, and
also that you have ways of mitigating stress and kind of dealing with that when times get hard. So
again with your hobbies you want to choose hobbies that show dedication, progression, and development
of those non-cognitive skills. So maybe you like to run and you know in your first year in university
you ran a marathon you didn't even finish but three years later you qualify for Boston and
you know ran sub three hours. Like that shows a lot of dedication, a lot of commitment, a lot
of progression, and you definitely learn something important about yourself along the way. So include
those hobbies just make sure you know you're being judicious about choosing them. The next
myth is that everything on your sketch has to be medical. So this is absolutely not true. Though it's
important to show that you have been shadowing, that you have those clinical experiences, that
you've explored the career not everything on your sketch needs to be medical, there's a lot of other
ways to build those non-cognitive skills. Maybe you're super into theatre and through that you
learn communication skills, leadership skills, how to resolve conflicts. There's a lot of different
ways that you can build skills and become a better person. They don't all have to be within
the hospital or within research or something medicine related. Finally it's the biggest myth
and the biggest mistake I see with these sketches is just filling in every box and having a lot of
activities. This gets into what I said before about quality over quantity. So it's more important that
you demonstrate you know dedication, progression, and that you learn skills through your activities
then that you you know fill in all the boxes. Alright so that's my video for this week. I
hope you all enjoyed it. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel for even more great videos. If you're
looking for more specific tips to help you with your AMCAS sketch you can
check out the blog post I link below or you can sign up for your free initial consultation with
BeMo today. We give professional feedback on AMCAS sketches. See you all next week!