Role of High School Activities/Honors?

[bhishma]

Going to be a junior and just decided to aim for PhD/MD a few months back. I'm wondering how much of my highschool achievements would be good to mention when the time comes. Not the relatively trivial things but, for example things like National Merit, leadership positions (<< pretty sure that's a no), research experience?

The last one, research experience, is of particular concern. I started volunteering at an orthopedic research lab in the hospital during the summer after my junior year of high school. The first two summers I was involved with random projects and got to hear the orthopedic interns talk about the cases of the past week. The last year that i worked there I was directly involved with a research project that ended up going through to get published. How much of that do I mention?

Thanks for the information.

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[Captain Fantastic]

Going to be a junior and just decided to aim for PhD/MD a few months back. I'm wondering how much of my highschool achievements would be good to mention when the time comes. Not the relatively trivial things but, for example things like National Merit, leadership positions (<< pretty sure that's a no), research experience?

The last one, research experience, is of particular concern. I started volunteering at an orthopedic research lab in the hospital during the summer after my junior year of high school. The first two summers I was involved with random projects and got to hear the orthopedic interns talk about the cases of the past week. The last year that i worked there I was directly involved with a research project that ended up going through to get published. How much of that do I mention?

Thanks for the information.

AMCAS says you should leave high-school activites out unless you continued them while in college. Plus, I'm guessing the MD/PhD programs will want to see more recent research experience. Do you have any thing more recent than that?

 

[Lonelion87]

Yeah, I have also been told by an Admissions Rep that high school ECs and accolades are a moot point once you enter College.

 

[MossPoh]

None.


It is the same as applying for a job after college, they expect you to have significant focused accomplishments during college. A lot of us could post stuff out the wazoo from high school..my sheet would be 3 pages long with leadership/distinguished positions.

 

[BigRedPremed]

If you get a pub in HS or you continue an activity into college, then it'll be fine to mention it. Otherwise, med schools don't care.

 

[bhishma]

My main concern with this is Med Schools wanting you to have shadowing and hospital volunteering experience. I've done both of these, 400+ hours. Unfortunately, they were during the summers of my High School career. The last Summer that i worked there, after freshman year of college, I did research.

I don't want to seem like a purely research, engineer kind of student. But, I also don't want to "waste my time" doing low level volunteering with a hospital again. And I'm way past the point of "shadowing" a doctor to see what it's like. Time to move on to bigger and better things.

 

[medguy83]

I think if you published in HS it'd be pretty beneficial to mention. It's not like you won a coloring contest or something. Since your applying to a research track it's nice to put down.

 

[stat3113]

If you were a semi-finalist or better in the Intel Science Talent Search, that is something to mention. You can be a full prof and your CV will still list that. Something huge like that, but pretty much everything less than that is out.