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How important is it to have a leadership role on your application?
Leadership
- Thread starter iA-MD2013
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It's more important that you're capable of leadership. This generally means that you have successfully lead some... things.
As long as you can talk about a time where you have used or developed skills necessary for leadership, you should be all right.
As long as you can talk about a time where you have used or developed skills necessary for leadership, you should be all right.
L
LikeClockWork
Yeah, that's basically all that it amounted to during my interviews. Basically the specific things I had on the application gave the interviewer some direction when asking me questions, but beyond that it wasn't so amazing.
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Depends on the school...I know it's a requirement at Utah, but then again they have some crazy hoops you have to jump through...
I would check and see if any of the schools you are applying to have a similar requirement.
Leadership doesn't necessarily mean you were the president of a club..you could coach a kids sports team, organize a volunteer event, be in charge of something/someone at work, etc.
I would check and see if any of the schools you are applying to have a similar requirement.
Leadership doesn't necessarily mean you were the president of a club..you could coach a kids sports team, organize a volunteer event, be in charge of something/someone at work, etc.
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What are some things you can do in college that show leadership besides leadership roles in clubs/activities?
HumidBeing
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The way I think of this is that you don't have start something, or be an officer in something in order to show leadership. If you're mentoring in any way, that's leadership. When you're in charge of training someone on the job, that's leadership. Whenever you lead by example, that's leadership. If there is a family situation where you have to take control, that's leadership. I don't know how many adcomms think that way, but things like that are real, everyday life leadership.
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It's unfortunate. A lot of us have these leadership experience but it will not show up on paper!
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If everything is leadership, nothing is. Leadership is the art of getting a group of people to do something they don't want to do. Everything else is just management.
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Yep, I'd say it's also about having ultimate responsibility if things go wrong, i.e. if anyone in the group makes an error or if things go bad somehow, the leader is responsible regardless. My bet is that med schools look for this because the physician in charge has to make the best decisions he or she can, taking all info available into account, and then be personally & professionally responsible if things go wrong.
That said, from what I've seen in medicine, leadership is not nearly as much about convincing your team that you know what the heck you're doing as it is in business.. in a clinical setting, the nurse is not realistically going to say "doctor, I think we should do this alternate procedure instead". Much more hierarchical in medicine, although I think leadership is still important.
To more directly respond: mayo has I think 4 areas they focus on, leadership is one of the 4. I've not heard it specifically mentioned at any other school, but I have experience here so maybe some adcomms just didn't feel it was necessary to discuss.
