Lesson 8: Activities
While the Work and Activities section is often an afterthought for students, it should be considered just as important as the Personal Comment essay.
Further, a reader will encounter this section before the Personal Comment, meaning that this section has the potential to either set the tone or ruin the mood for the long-form essay to follow.
Begin with the Most Important Activity to You
Often, people think that prestige, regardless of context, provides the best lens through which to highlight talent. However, with medical school applications, this is far from the truth.
While you may have received a national award for a one-off essay you wrote on the future of the Constitution, this activity probably didn’t have as much impact on your desire to become a doctor as, say, your 800 hours you spent working as a nurse’s assistant.
Ultimately, you will be answering the question for the reader, “Does this person truly want to become a doctor?” Unless your prestigious essay on the Constitution argues for something like the incorporation of a Hippocratic Oath into Article VI, then it’s probably best you don’t list that activity first.
By placing an activity like your 800 hours of work as a nurse’s assistant first, you’re showing the reader two things: (1) You have put in the hard, often thankless work of understanding the medical system, and (2) you’re willing to show how the intangible character traits that come along with a gritty position outweigh the external importance of a prestigious, yet relatively irrelevant award.
Group Your Activities Together
While you should absolutely begin your Work & Activities section by describing the things that are most important to you, if you have similar Work & Activities, it can be helpful for the reader if you place related activities next to one another to connect the dots between your activities.
Let’s say you have three experiences within a hospital setting—as a medical scribe, as a sales clerk at the hospital’s gift shop, and as a volunteer telling bedtime stories to kids in the ER.
While the third activity may have been something you did as a high schooler to get your community service hours and has little relevance to you today, it can sometimes be helpful to group this with the other two activities so that the reader can project a narrative onto your background.
Even though it’s not, say, the third most important activity to you, if the first activity is, and you want to tell a complete picture of your trajectory, then you may want to place it third.
When reading these three activities sprinkled in with your work as a dishwasher at a Chipotle and your research in a chemistry lab, the reader may not be able to immediately draw the connections between your activities. However, if you read the three activities in a sequence, the reader may be able to more easily infer a trajectory—that the decisions you made to learn more about the world are important.
What Makes a Good Description
With 700 characters to describe each of all but your three most meaningful activities (where you have 1,325), you have a fair amount of space relative to undergraduate applications, which maxed out 150 characters on the Common App.
If there’s a common theme in this guide, it’s that specificity drives a compelling application. Saying that you “helped people” at your local soup kitchen gives less of an understanding of who you are as an applicant than saying that you “sourced donations for 200+ pounds of food that fed 300 people weekly.” In the latter statement, the reader can easily glean the scale of your effort, the initiative you took to ensure sufficient food, and the overall impact.
By getting into the specifics of your efforts and concretely describing the outcomes, you’re not only elucidating what you’ve done but also highlighting the intangible soft skills that are hugely important for doctors. The second description not only shows that you can handle working in a soup kitchen, but also that you can organize a team, take initiative, and communicate effectively to accomplish the tasks at hand.
If any of your activities inspired other activities, be sure to mention it. If, for example, you helped a visibly ill visitor to the soup kitchen get the proper care and attention he needed at a local hospital, which then led you to love advocating for patients as a nurse’s assistant, then be sure to mention it.
Connecting the dots allows readers to see that you’re not just doing activities for the sake of it. Without this type of context, you can easily run the risk of being one of those overachievers in high school who were in the marching band and math club and Model United Nations and photography club just because they thought college admissions committees would like a wide array of activities and not because they were passionate about them or used them to discover their true interests.
Describing how one activity directly or indirectly informs another can also be accomplished in the essay sections, but for shorter instances, you don’t necessarily want to expand upon for a full essay. The 700 characters of the Work & Activities Section works just fine.
