So, when entering work experience in AMCAS, should I create an entry for each job I’ve held over my career?
Would it make more sense to lump similar positions into one entry?
What about where I’ve held multiple positions at one company (say, as an engineer and a manager), should those be separated?
Finally, does anyone actually contact the person you list as a contact in the activities section? If so, what does that contact look like?
I divided mine out by responsibility because I expounded in each section to relate to skills that would lend to being a good student and doc. I would split engineer and manager jobs to show both your ability to act as a supervised engineer being separate from your ability to manage projects and lead a team. I think it kind of depends on how you organize your other experiences. I included unique, substantive training courses I went through on top the traditional “I had a job”, “I did clinical observations/volunteer”.
You have to put a contact for each but would not plan on them being contacted unless it is a highly unbelievable experience. Even then they’ll probably only have to verify that you did what you say you did. Make sure you don’t leave the reader with any questions as to what each experience is, though guidance I’ve seen says you don’t have to get into too much detail for common things. Use most of the character space to continue to sell yourself. I look at it as “you aren’t the experiences you’ve had, but the lessons you learned from those experiences help show your character”. Everyone does pretty similar things for the most part but have much different take aways. I’m sure there are other ways people would recommend tackling this part of the app as well.
Good luck with the wait list movement. Tomorrow starts the phase of the application cycle in which people get locked in to one school, potentially freeing up slots at others! (Assuming you’re waiting on an MD program)
With work experience do they want it to read like a resume or a paragraph summing up the experience and what it meant to you? I can imagine if I did the later they would get rather bored.
Reading my blog posts about the experience descriptions might be helpful. I did two, actually–one on the short AMCAS experiences and another on the “most meaningful” experiences, which you can find on my blog. I hope you find these helpful!
Cheers,
Liza
I pretty much did exactly what Liza’s blog says, though I hadn’t read that specific one before her post to this question.
I’d like to highlight the note in the AMCAS instructions about copy/paste. Make sure you PROOFREAD your sections after you save/refresh. There’s a chance that copy/paste can screw up your format or add/replace certain characters.