Nontrad fun with secondaries

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student1799

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I'm still grinding out my last few secondaries, and I've run into a couple of situations where I really feel like a square peg, because the forms are so obviously designed for traditional students.

Columbia: About how many hours per week, if any, did you spend in work for which you were recompensed during the college year?

Hmm. During college, about 10. During the next 20 years of my life, about 60.

NYU: If you have taken any time off or have graduated, describe what you have done during this time (1500 chars. max)

Oh, nothing much. I just had an entire career and a couple of kids ...

Albany Med: Asks you to list ECs (again, even though they're on AMCAS), as well as paid employment, with total hours for each activity or job. When I got to the jobs, it got pretty amusing: I had one with 22,500 hours! (I couldn't even put a comma in the number, because there wasn't enough space in the box.) I bet that one will make their eyes bug out, when they're mainly used to seeing people working a few hundred hours at the school library.
 
Best so far: University of Wisconsin - please list all of your activities since high school in chronological order. At about 1994, I just put, "Odd Jobs," and under the description part, I listed them. "Waitress, house painter, bartender, ranch hand, etc." I am sure someone got a giggle out of that. Unfortunately, the bar graph they make with this info only goes back 10 years.
:laugh:

Or, on several, "If you aren't planning to take classes, describe your plans for the next two semesters." How 'bout, working my ass off so I can pay for these secondaries while contributing enough to my family to make the mortgage... but I'm pretty sure that's not what they're looking for.
 
student1799 said:
...
Albany Med: Asks you to list ECs (again, even though they're on AMCAS), as well as paid employment, with total hours for each activity or job. When I got to the jobs, it got pretty amusing: I had one with 22,500 hours! (I couldn't even put a comma in the number, because there wasn't enough space in the box.) I bet that one will make their eyes bug out, when they're mainly used to seeing people working a few hundred hours at the school library.
Click to expand...

I put something like ~35,000 hours for my military service on a similar secondary. I didn't want to sound like a jackass but couldn't think of how else to report it other than 24/7.
 
Did you guys save your AMCAS app as a PDF? Mine was 18 pages long.
 
My Amcas primary was similar length. Student -- one thing I learned (painfully) last year was that it didn't work to list job 1-5, title, and what I did at that job. Feedback I rec'd from schools was that they don't care that I managed this thing or that thing as none of my many years' work experience was medical. This year (reapp) I changed this, listing among the AAMC primary each medical & volunteer activity separately, then several leadership things separately.

The schools said that their primary question was: how did these experiences prepare this person to be a doctor. I know what you're saying, it seems to make more sense to give most of the weight to what we did for a decade + rather than over a few hundred premed hours, but I'd suggest trying to gear everything toward how it prepared you for medicine. But yes, I know where you're coming from, my resume just barely fits on 2 pages with most of the technical details left out, tough to fit this in 1,500 charachters.
 
Nothing much since I graduated - I've left a path of destruction (both figuratively and literally) behind me.
 
nontrdgsbuiucmd said:
My Amcas primary was similar length. Student -- one thing I learned (painfully) last year was that it didn't work to list job 1-5, title, and what I did at that job. Feedback I rec'd from schools was that they don't care that I managed this thing or that thing as none of my many years' work experience was medical. This year (reapp) I changed this, listing among the AAMC primary each medical & volunteer activity separately, then several leadership things separately.

The schools said that their primary question was: how did these experiences prepare this person to be a doctor. I know what you're saying, it seems to make more sense to give most of the weight to what we did for a decade + rather than over a few hundred premed hours, but I'd suggest trying to gear everything toward how it prepared you for medicine. But yes, I know where you're coming from, my resume just barely fits on 2 pages with most of the technical details left out, tough to fit this in 1,500 charachters.
Click to expand...

I did something similar to what you're describing: The vast majority of the ink went to my clinical experience/research, of which I have a fair amount. I gave each of my last 3 jobs (which together cover 15 years) a separate, but pretty short description (about 350 characters), while I lumped all the others into a single entry with just employer, title and dates for each.

This issue of how to present non-medical experience as relevant to medicine seems pretty tricky to me. On a previous version of my PS, I mentioned various skills I'd learned in my first career and how I thought they might be applicable to medicine. But my readers shot this down on the grounds that "You're not allowed to tell a doctor what doctors do. Since you're not one yet yourself, you don't really know anything about it." I must say, I was pretty surprised at that; I'm not a lot of other professions either, yet (as far as I can tell) I'm allowed to describe what they do without getting scolded for it. But, of course, I did as I was told and totally rewrote the PS.

The question is, then, if you're not allowed to "describe what a doctor does," how can you describe some other profession as having prepared you for it? Looks like a classic Catch-22 to me. So I just briefly described what I'd done and let them sort it out.
 
When I was in high school, I applied to the University of Miami's BS/MD program. Almost 15 years later when I applied for their MD program at age 30, I had to answer "yes" to the question that asked, "Have you previously applied to U of Miami School of Medicine?" The next question said, "If you answered yes to the previous question, please explain what you have done to strengthen your application." My answer began with, "Earned a high school diploma and graduated as HS class valedictorian," before describing my college, grad school, and work history. 😀 They must have appreciated my sense of humor, because I wound up being accepted there with a scholarship. 🙂

My AMCAS was 20 pages. Nine of them listed my crazy-a** coursework (including eight zillion entries for "research" the entire time I was in grad school), which is the same number of pages taken up by my essay and activities. 😳
 
ChairmanMao said:
Nothing much since I graduated - I've left a path of destruction (both figuratively and literally) behind me.
Click to expand...

I'm sure they'd love to hear that. :laugh:


My favorite "square peg" secondary moment was Boston's, which requires you to select how many semesters of various subjects you've taken. Well, the max on the pulldown was 12 . . . and with my two degrees in art history, when it came to "humanities" I was definitely over that number. 😛Good thing they had a box for explanations! So, then I had to decide whether to count each of my humanities classes as 1 semester (the way you'd do with bio or chem or physics), which came out to some absurd number like 47, or to say that each of my X semesters in school (X undergrad, X grad), I took at least one, if not 4 or 5 humanities courses. I think I ended up giving the absurd number, and then explaining the "calculation" in parentheses. Oh, and then, I further explained that that excluded AP or CLEP credits in humanities (worth another 6 "semesters"). :laugh:
 
CultureDoc said:
I'm sure they'd love to hear that. :laugh:


My favorite "square peg" secondary moment was Boston's, which requires you to select how many semesters of various subjects you've taken. Well, the max on the pulldown was 12 . . . and with my two degrees in art history, when it came to "humanities" I was definitely over that number. 😛Good thing they had a box for explanations! So, then I had to decide whether to count each of my humanities classes as 1 semester (the way you'd do with bio or chem or physics), which came out to some absurd number like 47, or to say that each of my X semesters in school (X undergrad, X grad), I took at least one, if not 4 or 5 humanities courses. I think I ended up giving the absurd number, and then explaining the "calculation" in parentheses. Oh, and then, I further explained that that excluded AP or CLEP credits in humanities (worth another 6 "semesters"). :laugh:
Click to expand...

Omg :laugh: I remember staring at that pull down menu & being amused. Btw it took frickin' forever trying to calculate how many "semesters" of humanities, etc. I took. Considering I was on a quarter system, and their definition of humanities included behavioral sciences (psych courses at grad lvl, check) AND languages AND arts (music courses, check).

Now that you mention it, I just realized that I forgot to count my "AP" credit. Not really AP credit as in AP test, but AP credit as in the credit my undergrad awarded through placing out of their proprietary placement tests. That was kinda confusing to fill out on AMCAS too, but that's a different story. If I were to count the 3 yrs of my college lvl language (my native language) + the 1 yr of high school foreign language that I got "AP" placement credit for, I don't even know what ridiculous # of "semesters" would be the total. Man. Somehow I don't think this is what BU had in mind when they designed that question 😉
 
Oh, oh! Just remembered - I totally had a senior moment on the Tulane secondary... in the "hobbies" section, I wrote somewhat stream of consciously. At the very end, because it was really late at night and I wanted to amuse myself, I wrote, "I secretly like to iron." Totally true, but I wasn't planning to leave it in. I did anyway. Hence my new sig. I'm still periodically laughing about that.
:laugh:
 
Nanon said:
Oh, oh! Just remembered - I totally had a senior moment on the Tulane secondary... in the "hobbies" section, I wrote somewhat stream of consciously. At the very end, because it was really late at night and I wanted to amuse myself, I wrote, "I secretly like to iron." Totally true, but I wasn't planning to leave it in. I did anyway. Hence my new sig. I'm still periodically laughing about that.
:laugh:
Click to expand...


I like to iron too! What are the odds of that. I wonder if you can put done common chores like washing and waxing your car, mowing the lawn, and barbequing as your hobbies since I get a kick out of these things.
 
unsung said:
Omg :laugh: I remember staring at that pull down menu & being amused. Btw it took frickin' forever trying to calculate how many "semesters" of humanities, etc. I took. Considering I was on a quarter system, and their definition of humanities included behavioral sciences (psych courses at grad lvl, check) AND languages AND arts (music courses, check).
Click to expand...

Whoops . . . I don't recall including my behavioral science classes with my humanities classes. Darn - the absurd number could have been even higher!! :laugh:

unsung said:
Somehow I don't think this is what BU had in mind when they designed that question 😉
Click to expand...

Yeah, probably not. :laugh: But I just can't imagine being one of those all-science-all-the-time kids who only had one or two semesters of humanities to put on that sheet! After all, don't you have to know a little something about "humanity" to practice medicine? I'm hoping they see my outrageous table and think: "whoah - that is wicked!" 😎

Oh and Nanon, I think I saw elsewhere that you put down your ironing proclivities on your Tulane app (maybe the 7/18 MCAT thread?). I don't think I commented there, but let me say now that I LOVE that you did that! I hope someone at Tulane recognizes that only someone super-cool and un-pretentious could write something like that on their app and decides to give you an interview! 😀
 
CultureDoc said:
Whoops . . . I don't recall including my behavioral science classes with my humanities classes. Darn - the absurd number could have been even higher!! :laugh:



Yeah, probably not. :laugh: But I just can't imagine being one of those all-science-all-the-time kids who only had one or two semesters of humanities to put on that sheet! After all, don't you have to know a little something about "humanity" to practice medicine? I'm hoping they see my outrageous table and think: "whoah - that is wicked!" 😎

Oh and Nanon, I think I saw elsewhere that you put down your ironing proclivities on your Tulane app (maybe the 7/18 MCAT thread?). I don't think I commented there, but let me say now that I LOVE that you did that! I hope someone at Tulane recognizes that only someone super-cool and un-pretentious could write something like that on their app and decides to give you an interview! 😀
Click to expand...


Yes I LOVE the ironing thing. BTW Boston now lets you go up to 20 credits. I had 20 in several areas. LOL. And I secretly like to iron as well. It is so satisfying to smooth out all those wrinkles. And then you have to wear it and get it all wrinkly again. I walk around all stiff for the first couple of hours I put something on thats all ironed nice. I hate sewing on buttons.
 
scottyT said:
I put something like ~35,000 hours for my military service on a similar secondary. I didn't want to sound like a jackass but couldn't think of how else to report it other than 24/7.
Click to expand...

I had a similar situation on my application. I had to list how many hours/week I was a caregiver for my mother who lived with me and was chronically ill. It was a 24/7 job for me, too, but I ended up putting in 40 hours/week because I figured it was at least as much work as a full time job.
 
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