Common AMCAS Work and Activities Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

Your MCAT score gets you in the door. Your personal statement tells your story. But the Work and Activities section is the first place admissions committees look to figure out who you actually are.

And it’s where most premeds fall short. Avoid these AMCAS Work and Activities mistakes, and you’ll already be ahead of most applicants.

AMCAS Activities Mistakes to Avoid

1 | Aiming for Quantity Over Quality

The AMCAS application allows you to select up to 15 activities, but you don’t have to fill all of them. Each entry needs to reflect authentic, sustained involvement. If you joined a club, went to a few meetings, and moved on, leave it off.

Including activities you only had a passing interest in raises red flags. Adcoms will wonder why it’s there, and whether you’re padding. Worse, it invites them to scrutinize the rest of your application more closely. Medical school demands four years of rigorous focus, followed by three to seven years of residency. Schools want students who can commit, and your activity list is one of the clearest signals of that.

So, how many activities should you include for medical school? Aim for around ten experiences that reflect genuine depth and longitudinal commitment. If you have more that meet that bar, include them. If you’re stretching to fill slots, don’t.

Adcoms have read thousands of applications. They know fluff when they see it.

2 | Using AI to Write Your Descriptions

AI can help you brainstorm, outline, and edit. But handing it your activity descriptions and hitting publish is one of the fastest ways to sink your application.

The result sounds like this: “I developed leadership competencies through strategic coordination of a 15-person interdisciplinary team, resulting in a 30% operational efficiency improvement.” That’s ChatGPT turning volunteering into corporate speak. Adcoms are reading versions of that sentence hundreds of times per cycle. They see the polish… and the absence of anything real behind it.

The Work and Activities section isn’t about sounding impressive. It’s about showing how you think and what you learned. Not “assisted with patient care in the emergency department,” but what that experience actually taught you about yourself and medicine.

For each activity, you have 700 characters. A good rule of thumb is to use roughly 500 to describe what you did, and the remaining 200 to show what it taught you.

For your three AMCAS Most Meaningful Experiences, you get an additional 1,325 characters. Don’t use that space to describe your responsibilities in more detail. Show how your thinking evolved. What did you believe at the start? What specific moments shifted your perspective? What do you understand now that you didn’t before?

If ChatGPT could have written your description without knowing anything personal about you, rewrite it.

3 | Separating Activities That Should Be Grouped

Another common mistake is separating experiences that should be grouped together. This is another way students try to stretch a thin application across all 15 slots.

You don’t have to fill all 15 sections. If you have 15 strong experiences, include them all. But don’t separate similar activities just to pad your list.

Shadowing is the most common offender. Group all your shadowing into a single AMCAS activity description and speak to the overall experience. Adcoms don’t need you to explain what shadowing is. They’ve seen it thousands of times and did it themselves.

Separating similar activities makes your entire Work and Activities section feel thin. One poorly written, surface-level description can drag down an otherwise strong application. Group similar activities, especially short-lived ones, and use the space to speak to what you actually learned.

4 | Not Utilizing the Space You Have

Any space you have to express your story on your medical school application should be seen as an opportunity. It’s a chance for you to establish a clear narrative of who you are, what you’re passionate about, and why you will make a great future doctor.

The Work and Activities section is not a list, and it’s not a resume. Think of each entry as a mini personal statement that concisely explains how your experiences have shaped who you are today. That’s how to write AMCAS activities that actually land.

Don’t shy away from including one or two meaningful hobbies, even if they don’t have a direct connection to medicine. Years spent playing league sports demonstrate you know how to work as part of a team, and medicine is a team sport. A decade spent practicing piano shows dedication and commitment to learning, another key aspect of medicine.

Hobbies give admissions committees insight into who you are beyond your grades. Programs want to create diverse student bodies filled with students who have a variety of interests, as this enriches the campus as a whole. Plus, your unique hobby will help you stand out amongst a long list of other candidates who are checking off the boxes for research, clinical experience, and volunteering.

Use the space provided, but don’t fill it with fluff that doesn’t actually help admissions committees learn more about you.

You could say:

“Two years committed to the Pioneer Leadership Program (PLP), which selects 88 qualified candidates of over 1,400 students.”

This type of description is okay for a resume, but it doesn’t dig into the bigger picture, and it wastes your limited space of only 700 characters.

Instead, expand on the program’s details. Don’t just say it was competitive. What skills did you learn, and where did that achievement take you? Ultimately, this supports the cohesion of your overall application narrative.

“Each year, the Pioneer Leadership Program (PLP) selects 88 highly qualified students from an incoming class of over 1,400 undergraduates to join a specialized living and learning community with the goal of developing leaders for the 21st century. In addition to unique classes on social justice, civic engagement, and ethics, the program provides opportunities for service and community projects that seek to address “wicked problems” and teach citizen-leadership. Ultimately, completion of the program results in a Leadership Studies minor accompanied by a transformative set of skills, including the evaluation of situations through a critical lens and sustaining crucial conversations.”

Instead of simply listing the accomplishment, use the space you have. In this example, an applicant turned their scholarship into an activity that pulls in themes of problem-solving, ethics, and leadership.

Learn from other successful examples: AMCAS Work and Activities Examples From Sought-After Matriculants.

5 | Giving a Surface-Level Response

The Work and Activities section is not a resume, and your AMCAS activity descriptions shouldn’t read like one. Successful entries provide details, add to your overall story, and give the reader a clear sense of who you are.

It doesn’t need to be a full essay, but generic language and cliches will lose your reader fast. We’re not suggesting you pull out the thesaurus or try to turn each description into an overly-elegant, flowery piece of verse, but you need to keep the attention of your reader. How can you describe your activities in a way that’s unique to you? How can the details of what you experienced and learned differentiate you from other candidates?

Relate each description back to the bigger picture. This is especially important for your AMCAS Most Meaningful Experiences, where adcoms expect real depth and reflection.

Admissions committees already have your CV. The Work and Activities section is your chance to expand on it and show them whether you’ll be a good fit for their school.

6 | Assuming You Can Remember Your Activities

You’ll forget important details if you don’t track, journal, or keep some kind of record of your activities throughout your premed journey.

When you’re in the middle of the experience, your thoughts and takeaways are clear. So clear it may feel like there’s no way you’ll forget your insights and anecdotes by the time you apply to medical school. After all, this was a deeply meaningful experience for you. It must be imprinted on your brain forever, right?

Wrong.

You will forget, and your memory will warp the further you get from the experience. That’s how memories work. They fade.

The best activity descriptions provide vivid details. Beyond remembering how the experience made you feel, you also need to provide a clear account of the hours you put in, when you started and finished, and who you worked with. These are all details that will become more difficult to recall as the years go by.

By the time you get to your application, you may be trying to remember information from 2, 3, or even 4 years ago. That’s a long time to hold onto details, especially when your brain has more important things to retain, like the brachial plexus.

Pick a system for tracking activities, including hours, breakthroughs, the people you worked with, what you learned, and how you felt during the experience. Figure out what works best for you, whether that be a physical journal, Word doc, or spreadsheet. What matters most is that you choose a medium you will continue to use.

We get it, you’re incredibly busy. But by not tracking your experiences as they come, you risk forgetting details and creating more work for yourself when it’s time to apply.

AMCAS Work and Activities FAQ

Why does including too many AMCAS activities hurt your application?

Including activities you weren’t seriously committed to signals to adcoms that you struggle to follow through. Quality always outweighs quantity. A shorter list of meaningful, longitudinal experiences is far more compelling than 15 entries that lack depth. When learning how to write AMCAS activities, less is often more.

Should I combine shadowing hours into one AMCAS activity?

Yes. Group all your shadowing into a single AMCAS activity description and speak to the overall experience. Adcoms don’t need shadowing explained to them. Use the space to reflect on what you observed and how it shaped your understanding of medicine.

How do I make my AMCAS activity descriptions stand out?

Avoid generic language and AI-polished corporate speak. Use specific moments and real details to show how the experience changed how you think. For your AMCAS Most Meaningful Experiences, focus on transformation over responsibility. If ChatGPT could have written it without knowing you personally, rewrite it.

What should I track during my premed activities?

Log your hours, start and end dates, the people you worked with, key moments, and your takeaways at the time. Details fade faster than you’d expect. A simple journal, spreadsheet, or Word doc works fine. What matters is that you actually use it consistently.

Can I include hobbies in the AMCAS Work and Activities section?

Yes, and you should consider it. One or two meaningful hobbies can reveal qualities that clinical and research experiences don’t, like teamwork, discipline, and creative thinking. Just make sure you have something substantive to say about them beyond listing the activity itself.

Getting Your AMCAS Work and Activities Right Starts Earlier Than You Think

Most of these mistakes aren’t made at the application stage. They’re made in freshman and sophomore year, when students aren’t yet thinking about how their experiences will read on an application two or three years later. By the time you’re filling out AMCAS, it’s too late to go back and build the depth you didn’t create.

The students with the strongest Work and Activities sections didn’t get lucky. They planned ahead, tracked everything, and were intentional about the experiences they pursued from the start.

Not sure where you stand or what you should be doing right now? Get your personalized premed timeline and see exactly what you should be doing, month by month, to put yourself in the best possible position when it’s time to apply.