November 18, 2025
Written By
Michael Minh Le
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You’ve probably spent years racking up clinical hours, shadowing doctors, leading clubs, conducting research, and giving back to your community. But now you’re staring at a blank screen, wondering how to condense each experience into 700 characters for your AMCAS work and activities section.
What do you include? How do you categorize it? Which ones should be "most meaningful"?
In this guide, we’re breaking down exactly how to master the AMCAS Work and Activities section. You’ll learn how much this section really matters, how to choose your most meaningfuls, how to select the right categories from the 19 AMCAS gives you, how to write compelling activity descriptions (even for virtual and gap year experiences), and more.
If you want to see how real successful applicants actually filled out their Work and Activities, including their chosen categories, descriptions, and most meaningfuls, then download our free Application Database. It includes 8 full AMCAS applications that earned acceptances to top schools like UCLA and UCI.
Get your free resource here.
The AMCAS Work and Activities section matters more than you think.
Here’s the truth: no one gets into medical school because they had exactly 15 perfectly filled-out activities. But people absolutely get rejected because their activities section was lazy, generic, or worse, forgettable.
The AMCAS Work and Activities section needs to be a snapshot of who you’ve been when no one was watching. It’s where AdComs look to see:
Remember, almost every applicant has shadowed, volunteered, done research. But how you talk about it, how deeply you understand the why behind what you did, is what separates average from unforgettable.
So does it matter?
Only if you want to get in.
The AMCAS Work and Activities section gives you 15 entries to prove you're more than just a GPA and an MCAT score.
That’s it. 15 chances. Max.
Each entry is capped at 700 characters, which is barely enough for a long paragraph. That means every word has to matter. The challenge is that you’re not just listing what you did; you’re telling the story of why it mattered. Think action + impact + reflection. Cut the fluff. Kill the passive voice.
And out of those 15, you’ll choose three Most Meaningful experiences. These are the crown jewels of your application. For each of these, you get an extra 1,325 characters to go deeper. This is where you explain what the experience taught you, how it changed you, and why it’s central to your journey to medicine.
Don’t waste these on filler activities. Choose the things that genuinely shaped you. Talk about the experiences where you showed up, failed, learned, and kept going.
The structure may seem rigid. But within those limits? That’s where you prove you're the kind of doctor AdComs want to train.
Don’t pick the ones that sound impressive. Pick the ones that actually changed you.
Too many applicants make the mistake of choosing their Most Meaningfuls based on what they think admissions committees want to hear: “I worked in a lab at a top university,” “I shadowed a neurosurgeon,” “I volunteered abroad.”
Great, but so did everyone else.
What the best applicants do? They pick experiences that left a mark.
Ask yourself:
Your Most Meaningfuls should answer one or more of these:
Let’s look at one of my most meaningful experiences.
I chose to write about being a health coach in a digital lifestyle intervention program. On paper, it might seem like just another clinical volunteer gig. But how I wrote about it helped me get accepted to UCLA Med.
Instead of listing duties, I told a story about my first patient. He was a man struggling with obesity and self-esteem.
I talked about how we built trust, set goals together, and celebrated small wins. I reflected on what it taught me about communication, empathy, and behavior change. It wasn’t about the step count or meal tracking. It was about learning how to motivate someone who had lost belief in themselves.
This activity really worked in my favor because:
That's the difference between a Most Meaningful that gets skimmed and one that gets remembered.
When you add an experience to your AMCAS application, you’ll have to assign it one of 19 official categories. And no, they aren’t just labels.
The category you choose frames how AdComs read that experience. Label your summer camp job as “Teaching/Tutoring” and it says one thing. Label it as “Community Service” and it says something else. So choose wisely.
Here are the 19 AMCAS Work and Activities categories:
Not sure which category to choose?
Start with your primary role. What were you actually doing?
Tip: Ask yourself: If I stripped away the setting, what was I actually contributing?
And if you feel like an activity fits multiple categories, don’t panic. That’s normal.
Pick the category that highlights the core value of the experience:
Just be sure you’re consistent. If you list shadowing three times, all under different categories, that’s a red flag. The same goes for similar roles across jobs. Don’t reframe your MA work as “Community Service” in one entry and “Paid Employment – Clinical” in another.
Here’s a few more tips for you:
You don’t need to hit all 19 AMCAS categories, but if you want to be competitive, there are a few that absolutely need to show up somewhere on your application. These aren’t “nice-to-haves.” They’re expected.
Writing a great AMCAS entry isn’t about making yourself sound impressive. It’s about making sure the reader instantly gets what you did, why it mattered, and who it helped you become..
Each description is a 700-character window into a piece of your life. Your goal isn’t to list tasks. Your goal is to show growth, impact, and clarity.
Every type of experience, whether it's clinical, virtual, or from your gap year, deserves to be framed intentionally. Here’s how to write each one.
These are your bread-and-butter experiences: volunteering, research, shadowing, leadership, tutoring, etc. The formula is simple, but execution matters.
Use this structure:
Keep it active. Cut fluff. Focus on impact over tasks.
Typically, we don’t recommend virtual experiences, but they can count if they impacted you deeply.
When writing about virtual research, telehealth shadowing, or remote service work:
Tip: If it felt less “hands-on,” focus more on what you observed, how you responded, or what surprised you.
Gap years aren’t a red flag. They’re often a green one because they can show maturity and real-world exposure. But the way you frame them matters.
If you're currently in your gap year:
AMCAS allows you to include anticipated experiences (e.g., a role that will start soon or continue into the future).
Here’s how to handle it:
Example:
I’ve completed 60 hours of training as a clinical care extender and will begin patient-facing rotations in July 2025.
If it hasn’t happened yet, don’t pretend it has.
These can feel tricky to write because they’re often short, sweet, and less story-driven.
Here’s how to handle them:
The biggest mistakes applicants make on their Work and Activities section have nothing to do with their actual experiences and everything to do with how they write about them.
Here are the most common pitfalls that tank otherwise solid applications:
“This experience taught me leadership, communication, and teamwork.”
Cool. So did middle school.
Avoid buzzwords with no context. If a stranger can copy and paste your description into their app and it still makes sense, then it’s too generic. Be specific. Tell a story. Show what you did, not what you think they want to hear.
“I greeted patients, stocked supplies, answered phones...”
You’re not applying to be a front desk assistant. Focus on the impact of your actions and what you learned in the process.
Some applicants treat the extra 1,325 characters like a place to ramble or rehash their 700-character entry.
Big mistake.
This is your best shot at depth. Use it to reflect, to show growth, and to connect your experience to why you want to practice medicine.
Adcoms have read thousands of these. They can smell fluff. Don’t say “coordinated community health initiatives” when you handed out flyers. Accuracy builds trust.
You do not need to use all 15 slots. If you're stuffing in random clubs or one-off events to look busy, stop. A focused application beats a bloated one every time.
So many applicants spend 90% of the character count describing what they did and 0% on what it meant. The experience itself matters less than your ability to reflect on it. Show how it changed the way you think, communicate, or care for others.
No, AMCAS does not independently verify your Work and Activities entries. But that doesn’t mean you should toe the line of truth vs. lie.
Just because they won’t call your supervisor doesn’t mean schools won’t. Many med schools do spot-check experiences, especially Most Meaningfuls or anything that looks exaggerated. Some secondaries even ask for contact info or proof.
If an AdCom calls your “research PI” and they’ve never heard of you, your app is toast.
Nope. Once you hit submit, your Work and Activities section is locked in.
If you forgot something or started a new experience later in the cycle, you can:
But you can’t go back and revise your AMCAS after submission. So triple-check everything before you submit.
No, and you shouldn’t unless every entry truly adds value.
Filling all 15 isn’t a flex if half of them are fluff. Admissions committees would rather see 8 solid, meaningful experiences than 15 “meh” ones padded with club meetings and weekend volunteering you did once.
Use as many entries as it takes to tell your story clearly. That might be 10. That might be 13. Very few people have 15 real entries, and that’s okay.
Yes, but do it carefully.
Combining is fine when:
But don’t group together totally unrelated experiences just to hit 15 or make it “look full.” That’s confusing and makes each activity feel less important.
You’ve spent years doing the hard part of building the experiences. But turning those into a compelling, clear AMCAS section? That’s where most applicants get stuck.
That’s why at Premed Catalyst, we compiled 8 real AMCAS applications that earned acceptances to top med schools like UCLA, UCI, and more. You’ll see exactly:
This isn’t theory, It’s the blueprint. And it’s 100% free.
Get your free resource here.
