AMCAS Work Experiences

[Espadaleader]

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Hello everyone. The new work activities section has changed for the worse.

#1. Each activity must have a start and end date. Yes, that means if you're currently in doing something like a gap year fellowship you cannot say "until present".

#2. Also, they don't have hours per week, they have total hours. Okay, so if you're doing teach for america you will have to either say you've ended the experience or lie on your hours because surely you have well over a thousand hours if you're doing something full time for a year.

What are you thoughts?

I dont like piecemealing the experiences like you would have to do. For a year long internship (40 hous a week) you would have to have three start and end dates for the experience. Rant over.

 

[OCDOCDOCD]

I don't know if there's an official solution for the lack of a fourth digit in the total hours box, but unless I hear differently I think what I'm going to do is type in "999" for hours and then give the real amount in the description.

I think total hours is better than average hours though. With average hours a common issue is that you may have put in a lot of hours whenever you did do that activity, but you may have only done the activity intermittently, meaning you either have to put the average hours when you were actually working (kind of dishonest since it gives the impression you worked a lot more than you did) or average in all those weeks when you weren't working (which makes an important activity look like something you did as a throwaway check box activity). Total hours avoids all of that. The only issue is that it can mask what your time commitments were in some cases, but in those cases you can just list the average hours per week that you worked in the description.

 

[deleted307836]

I think total hours is better than average hours though. With average hours a common issue is that you may have put in a lot of hours whenever you did do that activity, but you may have only done the activity intermittently, meaning you either have to put the average hours when you were actually working (kind of dishonest since it gives the impression you worked a lot more than you did) or average in all those weeks when you weren't working (which makes an important activity look like something you did as a throwaway check box activity). Total hours avoids all of that. The only issue is that it can mask what your time commitments were in some cases, but in those cases you can just list the average hours per week that you worked in the description.

Completely agree with this - it always bothered me that my weekly averages would be so diluted for things I did intermittently over years.

I haven't seen this year's AMCAS but I think your 999 + actual amount in the description plan sounds like the best option. It sounds like something they will probably have fixed...