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The 700 character space often includes some of : activity description, motivation for involvement, your role, skills gained.
It's best to have a balance among those choices, provided the hourly totals for each space are strong enough to stand on their own.
I did have significant roles, but I don't have space to split up my activities into leadership vs. mentoring/volunteering responsibilities. Like I led a cohort of undergrad teachers and I was on a leadership team in charge of the educational component of a outreach club. I'm applying to service based schools and selective schools. So should I just split between volunteering and leadership because my title/description includes my teaching and leadership role?
IMO, if you can't dedicate a space to leadership alone, it should not have a Leadership tag. So I suggest a split between Community Service and Teaching-tagged spaces, with the leadership roles alluded to in the titles.
The last three are fine, but the first would do better with a few more letters. Older adcomms are still used to seeing ER for Emergency Room and think of ED as erectile dysfunction.
ALso consider EM (Emergency Medicine)
Your Contact doesn't have to be someone who knows you, as the contact isn't intended to provide a reference, just a confirmation of dates and rough hours of involvement. For the minimum wage job, there might be a pay office you could use. For the volunteer position, there might be computer records that can be accessed. For a student activity, the Student Affairs Office may have records. A college Registrar can generally attest to honors, awards, and scholarships of note.
I think that using a 9999 would be suitable. In the narrative you might include that "practice, meetings, and and meets routinely took XX - YY hr/wk, year round," or somesuch comment.
Were the clients referred by physicians? What sorts of diagnoses did these people have. When you say you "administered psychological tests," could you describe further? Did you have special training/a certificate for this task?
I would not suggest using Volunteer-Clinical. Some of it was probably EMT Shadowing. For the estimated time that you were being useful (EMT Scribing, perhaps?), I think it's reasonable to consider it active clinical experience with patients but I think that using the tag "Other" and making the clinical aspect clear from the title of the space and your description would be suitable.
Not a red flag to me-- sounds like an awesome thing to really bring your personality out!
Yeah! who cares if they are competitive. Why not just make a hobbies section about club sports and include the accomplishments in the description. I think thats more of a substantial activity.
Yes. As Hobbies doesn't need a Contact listed, you'd be spared finding your old coach and asking if he/she would verify the Intercollegiate Sport activity.
While you could enter the 1st and 2nd place wins under Awards, it would be better to keep the recognitions with the affiliated sport entry.
The only other "award" I have is Dean's List for a semester. I know that's pretty weak so I was hoping to use these to fill that slot out.
Yes.
If the header will have the dates the leadership began and the hours of the leadership position, and the narrative will revolve around a description of the leadership role, then using a Leadership tag is fine. If you want to include in the same space the dates and hours of the general employment that preceded the onset of the management position (along with mention of the onset of leadership in the narrative), all in one space, then use Employment as the tag.
You could, if you want to minimize the research process for some reason (the more important component), but why not use a Research-labeled space and mention the poster at the end?
Some Activity description examples for you, with thanks to member Nick Naylor:
Your question lies outside the scope of this thread. WAMC, where you also posted, is the appropriate forum to answer your concern. Please don't crosspost in multiple forums, as you have. It makes the Mods cranky.
I didn't think about this--I assumed I should categorize this as "poster/presentation" just because I have a poster presentation. This would also be my 4th research category--maybe that's too much. I stayed consistent in my volunteering activities so I have a few 2-3 year commitments, but I jumped around labs until I found things I liked, so I have multiple smaller, 100 hour research experiences.
You could group some of the briefer research experiences and then have room for a space dedicated to Posters/Presentations, too.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I think making it a research section and deemphasizing the poster is what I would prefer more, because I learned more from the process/class and not as much from the poster itself. Do you think it would matter in terms of how schools would view it? I also was hesitant because if I listed the research, I'm basically talking about the class itself, and then wouldn't I be double counting my curricular activities as extracurricular activities?
1) Where did you present the poster? Was it at your university? Was the poster a requirement of the class?
I couldn't present it at my university conference because it got cancelled due to Covid, but the conference gave us permission to cite the poster presentation on resumes and what not. The writeup/rough poster was a requirement of the class, but registering it with the conference, touching it up to be presentation worthy, and presenting it was an option.
You can't do both, but I was told to put it under community service, if your title and description clearly shows your leadership role. If you have space, you can split it up into separate leadership activities and community service activities. If you're lacking in explicit leadership sections, you can list it as leadership, but I personally listed mine as community service since my leadership role is apparent in the title/description.
If you have the space to use two slots so that you can dedicate them to the leadership roles vs the service roles that would be ideal, so long as you split the hours out and don't count them twice.
An on-campus poster presentation that did not undergo a competitive, peer-review process (being required and all) is most appropriately included with the Research description, rather than being given a Posters/Presentations space. In your case, as the presentation did not happen due to COVID-19, the most you can say is that the poster had been scheduled for a presentation at [Campus Poster Day, or whatever the event was called] but the event was canceled due to . . .
1) List it under Hobbies. For hours use 999 (meaning unknowable number), since it doesn't really matter for this category or your best-guess estimate.
1) I suggest using the Teaching or Artistic Endeavors tag.
In general, I'd say it applies across the board. Would you like to reproduce the sentence you're not sure about? I can delete it from my quote.
It depends. Are you a good candidate for highly-selective, research-oriented med schools? Then you'd want to give more emphasis to your research endeavors (unless some of them were not particularly significant in demonstrating an upward trajectory in significance, problem solving, &/or creative input). If your focus is more on less-selective, primary care or service-oriented schools, then combining some of the labs to de-emphaize research involvement could be a better strategy for you.
1) Yes, list it on AMCAS.
I think that's subtle enough to include if you want to. What I would not want to see would be your projection that those skills would be helpful in a future doc.
