unique is a bad and overused word. Very few people are unique. No matter how many starving minority aids babies you chewed up and regurgitated food for, and no how many medical missions you took to chew up said food, other people have probably done it more times than you and done it better than you and applied to medical schools with this as an EC, and likely submitted their applications earlier in the cycle than you did.
"cookie-cutter applicant" refers to the applicant with just the very typical (and arguably boring) volunteer/hospital/research trifecta of extracurriculars and nothing else to distinguish themselves from the tens of thousands of other applicants. The applicant that, while he did volunteer in a hospital, in a soup kitchen, with the homeless, and while he did play with test tubes in some fancy lab, almost every other applicant has done the same thing.
But striving to be "unique" is a very SDN thing....don't worry about focus on trying to be "unique," but rather to think outside the box a little and build some valuable (to you, not to others) life experiences instead. Don't just simply check off box after box after box just because you are concerned about fitting within the status quo.
