Today on Application Renovation, I'm taking a look at Sierra's whole med school application to give her some ideas of what she needs to improve. We talk about her grades, MCAT score, personal statement, and especially her work and activities section!
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One of Sierra's big mistakes in her AMCAS and AACOMAS applications was that she didn't include one of her biggest clinical experiences in her activities section. She didn't include it because she already wrote about it a lot in her personal statement. But this is a big mistake. While you shouldn't repeat exact stories from your personal statement to your activities section, you should be sure to include your clinical experiences in your activies section—even if you already mentioned them in your personal statement!
If you ever realize that you messed up something like this in your AMCAS or AACOMAS application, or even in your secondaries, you might consider emailing the medical schools you applied to. You can update them and make sure they see all the relevant information.
We also took a deep dive into her AMCAS activities section in general. We discuss how you can massage the job titles you include (with permission from your employer/supervisor), and how this can help communicate the clinical nature of the position. We also talked about storytelling—showing, not telling—and giving the patients a fake name just to aid in the storytelling. We talk about discussing IMPACT versus outlining what the experience taught you.
Sierra has a 501 MCAT score, which is the main thing I would advise her to improve beyond fixing her activities section. She had some problems with her grades in the past, but she has a pretty strong upward trend at this point, and her science GPA and cumulative GPA are not likely to hurt her as much as that MCAT score.
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