by Cydney Foote
2025-2026 AMCAS Work and Activities Section: What to Include (with Examples)
The AMCAS Work and Activities section is where you will share all your research, clinical experiences, paid employment, publications, leadership, extracurricular activities, awards, memberships, volunteer work, and advocacy and social justice efforts.
The types of activities that you include, the length of time you participated in them, and your description of these events all have an impact on how admissions committees will view your dedication to this career path.
The AMCAS Work and Activities categories
The AMCAS primary application allows you to enter 15 activities. You should include all your significant post-secondary experiences – that is, the ones that occurred after you completed high school. You can also include future activities (those that will take place after you’ve submitted your primary application), along with the hours you anticipate accruing.
Each activity must be listed in one of the following categories:
- Artistic Endeavors
- Community Service/Volunteer – Medical/Clinical
- Community Service/Volunteer – Not Medical/Clinical
- Conferences Attended
- Extracurricular Activities
- Hobbies
- Honors/Awards/Recognitions
- Intercollegiate Athletics
- Leadership – Not Listed Elsewhere
- Military Service
- Other
- Paid Employment – Medical/Clinical
- Paid Employment – Not Medical/Clinical
- Physician Shadowing/Clinical Observation
- Presentations/Posters
- Publications
- Research/Lab
- Social Justice/Advocacy
- Teaching/Tutoring/Teaching Assistant
The ideal Work and Activities breakdown
In very general terms, a strong med school application will include the following:
- Two or three leadership roles
- Two or three extracurricular, community service, and advocacy activities
- Two or three clinical experiences (can be categorized as community service, paid employment, advocacy, leadership, or any other category, as long as direct patient exposure is involved)
- One or more research projects
- One publications section (in which you list all your publications)
- One presentations/posters section (in which you list all)
- One honors and awards section (in which you detail all)
- One shadowing section (in which you describe all shadowing under one heading)
- One or more paid employment (you can list all under one to save space)
- One hobby or artistic endeavor (preferably one in which you have reached some degree of mastery and/or teach to others)
As long as you can show your involvement in the four key areas of leadership, hands-on clinical experience, research, and community service, and you have 15 activities (fewer could hurt your application), any combination of the activity types we’ve mentioned here can be successful.
As you begin to identify your experiences, it helps to approach this section with an eye to the profile you hope to present. What is your objective? Are you positioning yourself as a research-heavy applicant? If so, you will probably have multiple research and publication entries, but make sure to show that you’re a well-rounded applicant by also including your extracurricular activities and hobbies. Are you someone whose strengths lie in advocacy or leadership? These can be your focus, but also include a research activity (and don’t limit yourself to wet lab or medical research). Every applicant’s objective will be different, and the activities you choose to highlight will support the kind of candidate you claim to be.
What if you can’t come up with 15 activities? For instance, what if you have engaged in one community or extracurricular activity over a number of years, contributing a significant number of hours to this work? Think about how your involvement could be broken up into different entries. Did your responsibilities grow and did you take on leadership roles? Describing your more general duties as a regular member versus your vision and impact as group president might warrant separate entries; likewise, you might separate out your work with a partner organization. This is not always the ideal situation, but it can work. Just be sure your other activities reveal that you are a well-rounded candidate.
What if you end up with more than 15 activities? You can combine different experiences within one activity description, as long as the activities are similar enough to each other. Take advantage of this option to make sure that you cover everything. For instance, you can group all your publications or shadowing experiences into a single description. Just be sure to include all the vital details, including the name, specialty, and contact information for each physician you shadowed.
What not to include in this section
We recommend that you exclude the following from your Work and Activities section:
- Activities from primary or secondary school
- Hair or blood donations
- Babysitting for family
- Research or projects for which you received course credit (with exceptions for major projects such as theses and biomed projects)
- Paid employment that could be considered unethical or morally questionable
- Shadowing a parent or family member who is a medical professional
- Religious attendance
Long-term versus short-term activities
The length of time that you have participated in each activity will be scrutinized, so include long-term (one year or longer) activities whenever possible. Admissions committees love continuity, and having short-term activities exclusively – no more than six months for each, for example – can be considered a red flag. Lots of short-term activities could indicate that the applicant is difficult to work with or lacks commitment. Most successful applicants have a combination of long- and short-term experiences.
Writing a strong activity description
For each activity description, you need to briefly introduce the company or organization involved – for instance, “ABCMC is a nonprofit healthcare facility serving the Main Street community.” If your experience is in a lab, explain the research goal in terms that anyone can understand.
The heart of your experience is your role, so be specific about what you did and the impact you had. This might be your responsibilities as a team member in a lab: “I recorded vital signs and took medical histories for patients, and I shared these notes with on-staff physicians before appointments.” Or it might be your leadership of a group: “Over the 15-week campaign, as I learned to adopt a coaching mentality, I discovered a new confidence in my ability to apply my knowledge and relay information to the athletes.” Whatever it is, go beyond the superficial job description, and use this space to identify your strengths and accomplishments. The best descriptions will indicate what you have learned and include strong conclusions that demonstrate a high level of reflection in terms of what the experience meant to you and how you helped others through it.
Choosing your three most meaningful experiences
In addition to your activity descriptions, you’re asked to expand on your three most meaningful experiences (MMEs). These longer essays are a chance to reveal your goals, values, and personal qualities in a way that the shorter descriptions don’t allow. Through them, we can see how you put your beliefs into action, so don’t be afraid to get personal here. It’s great to hear that you made a strong impact on a person or a community, but be sure to also explain why making that kind of impact is important to you. And of course, emphasize, if relevant, how this will make you a better physician.
Don’t underestimate the importance of your MMEs in your application. They might not be as long as your personal statement, but they should still pack a punch. For the best results, follow these steps:
- Outline your ideas to provide more thoughtful and detailed responses, and identify the reasons each experience was so meaningful to you.
- In your writing, begin with the least important experiences and end with the most significant ones.
- Give yourself enough time to complete a few rounds of edits to ensure that you submit your best work.
For more on how to write the best MME descriptions, read this post: Meaningful Experiences for Medical School Applicants.
Examples of outstanding activity descriptions and MMEs
The examples here were generously shared by students who were accepted to medical school. As you’ll see, these are exceptionally well-written pieces, because they demonstrate how each student put the maximum amount of effort into their roles and responsibilities and gained an impressive degree of insight into themselves, others, the experience they discuss, and the impact they had.
Example #1: Volunteer at a Free Clinic
My primary responsibility as a volunteer at the Free Clinic of Central State was patient intake. Recording vital signs and taking medical histories opened my eyes to both the medical and socioeconomic challenges facing patients in under-resourced areas, bringing to life my public health class discussions of social determinants of health. In the light of these challenges, my favorite aspect of this experience was providing patients with a comforting, reassuring presence before they saw their healthcare provider. By actively listening and making sure that each patient felt understood, I found that my relatively small role could make a big difference.
Example #2: Emergency Department (ED) Technician
ABCMC is a nonprofit healthcare facility serving the Main Street community. After working closely with emergency physicians as a scribe, I decided to apply to become an ED technician. In this position, I work alongside nurses in providing patient care and performing procedures under their supervision. I have developed a comprehensive knowledge of emergent clinical procedures and the process of implementing treatment plans. I thoroughly enjoy performing procedures and comforting patients and their families. Through this experience, I have gained a greater respect for the care the clinical team and support staff provides to patients and physicians.
Example #3: Nutrition Program Developer and Director
Nutrition was frequently mentioned as an area that our patients would benefit from improving, but there was no sustainable solution or support program to help patients make these changes. I developed a screening tool with an attending physician at the clinic, trained volunteers to use them and collected patient survey data for a year on the nutritional preferences and needs of every patient possible. I then established a nutrition education program at XYZ that was tailored to the patients, run by a resident or an attending physician, and facilitated by me and other volunteers.
Example #4: Intern (activity description and MME)
For activities you’ve chosen as meaningful (i.e., one of your MMEs), you can go into more detail about your responsibilities in the description and use the longer MME entry to highlight your impact and accomplishments.
Prior to the start of my last semester in graduate school, I was hired by the University Football Performance Staff to serve as an Intern Strength and Conditioning Coach. In this position, I assisted staff during training sessions by coaching proper lifting techniques and providing direction and encouragement for the players. On several occasions, I led the team through myofascial-release exercises and warm-ups prior to workouts. I also helped set up and break down equipment for workouts and drills prior to each training session. The internship also included an education component, in which I learned how to construct precisely targeted, comprehensive strength and conditioning programs.
MME remarks:
From working with elite athletes at the peak of their physical potential, I gained new insight into the functional capacity of the human body. Throughout the semester, I studied an array of training schemes and modalities, and learned how these can be differentially leveraged according to an athlete’s unique physiology, training background, and positional needs in order to optimize physiologic adaptations. I was fascinated by the amount of research, experimentation, and creativity that goes into developing strength and conditioning programs. Coaching these athletes allowed me to translate theory into practice; I knew that each lift or drill that I instructed would play an intricate role in developing our athletes according to a precisely calculated plan. It was an electrifying experience to quantify the players’ weekly improvements in strength, power, and speed. However, becoming a coach taught me far more than how to construct strength programs or cue proper technique, I had to step up as a leader in a new environment. Over the 15-week campaign, as I learned to adopt a coaching mentality, I discovered a new confidence in my ability to apply my knowledge and relay information to the athletes.
Example #5: Health Coach (activity description and MME)
The patients I served at XYZ were largely an underserved population that needed support, access to health information, an advocate for their health both in clinic and out, and improved continuity of care. As a health coach, my job was to try and fill those needs. I used motivational interviewing to help patients articulate their questions to their provider while also helping them understand that they could actively achieve in their healthcare and how. I advocated for patients during their visit, ensuring all their questions were addressed, and followed up with each patient. Finally, to help improve health literacy, I would review each patient’s after-visit summary and medications list.
MME remarks:
As a health coach, I learned that half the battle for patients in regaining or maintaining good health, especially for people in underserved areas, was empowerment and support. As part of the pilot XYZ volunteers, I helped to implement XYZ’s motivational interviewing template to empower patients to ask questions, showed them they had a say in their own care and helped them to realize they could make the changes they wanted and needed to improve their health. To help improve continuity of care and accessibility, I followed up with patients every two weeks and relayed their questions or concerns to their provider, who then personally addressed them. Additionally, XYZ saw many non-English-speaking patients, so I dedicated extra time to working with them through a translator to ensure they understood all the information on their after-visit summary as well as their medications list. To improve health literacy for all patients, I helped pilot the use of a pictorial medication adherence form. I filled this form out with the patients, verified it with the provider, and then reviewed it with the patient before they left. It was my responsibility to help patients make the most of their visit by empowering them to get involved in their care and ensuring they left their visit well informed.
We hope these examples will help you reflect more deeply on your own experiences. Please do not copy or plagiarize any part of these paragraphs in your application. It would take only a simple Google search for an application reviewer to identify where they came from.
Be yourself in writing about what inspires and motivates you. Every application should showcase an entirely unique combination of experiences and reflections. The effort and thought that you put into this section of the AMCAS application matters and will have an enormous impact on the outcome. You might even end up enjoying the experience and learning something about yourself! Do you need help optimizing your AMCAS Work and Activities section? Schedule a free consultation with an Accepted expert.
Since 2001, Cydney Foote has advised hundreds of successful applicants for medical and dental education, residency and fellowship training, and other health-related degrees. Admissions consulting combines her many years of creating marketing content with five years on fellowship and research selection committees at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She’s also shared her strategy for impressing interviewers in a popular webinar and written three books and numerous articles on the admissions process. Want Cydney to help you get Accepted? Click here to get in touch!
Related Resources:
