Meaningful experience...but was in high school?

[funkymonkey0987]

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I was a CNA in high school and worked in all areas of the hospital and nursing homes with it. It was a very significant life experience because it solidified my desire to pursue a career in the health field. However, my advisor strongly advises against discussing pre-college experiences on our application and even says it can disqualify us. Given that it is an essay and not being listed under an activity, what do you think about me mentioning it?

 

[Gauss44]

Perhaps, ADCOMs could shed some light on this, but my sense is that a "most meaningful experience," is defined by AAMC as a work, school, or extracurricular activity you experienced/partook in during or after college?

Funny that, I thought, because the name "Most Meaningful Experience" makes it sound like they want to hear about your most meaningful experiences in LIFE, which may have been in childhood and have nothing to do with school, work, or EC's.

 

[Catalystik]

For AMCAS schools (like Baylor), there is no prohibition to listing HS activities, though they are better regarded if they continued after HS graduation, meaning, into the college years. One has the choice of listing it as an Experience or of discussing it in the Personal Statement. To be honest, it sounds like your Experience was so substantial, that I'd encourage you to list it anyway (more so if your active clinical experience during college was weak), and I'd find it hard to believe that your work history isn't an important past of your journey to medicine, which means it would go fine in the PS as well.

I don't know how TMDSAS schools view this, but perhaps someone else from your home state can chime in, like @DokterMom.

 

[funkymonkey0987]

Thank you both very much!! I think I will also include a bit about how it has been helpful recently in caring for my older (91 years old) grandparents.

 

[Gauss44]

I don't mean to throw this off topic and can start my own thread if others find that appropriate, but if I thought it was okay, I would write about one of my most meaningful experiences in LIFE: As a child, my best friend and foster sibling (another "ward of the court" and unadopted child), suffered a substantial concussion and was never the same after that. I remembered how much I wished I could help him and how much I prayed for him to get good care despite his status as being a poor unadopted foster kid. Skipping many details, it was from then on that I've been committed to doing my very best for every injured person, partially because no matter how they look to me or you, they might mean the world to someone else (and doing your best IMO is the right thing to do). (I also might add that while in foster care, I had siblings/friends who's parents were in need of medical care due to accidents, serious disease, and many times their parents were in societal categories that often don't get treated well. And to see that love and concern, and sometimes grief develop, very early on, I came to believe more and more in the above point.) But it didn't happen in college for the most part. In fact nothing I've seen in an emergency room, school, or elsewhere, has trumped what I learned as a child.