You once volunteered for two years in a row at a hospital, worked at a lab, tutored on weekends, and maybe kept up a hobby. You open AMCAS Work and Activities and get 700 characters per entry. How do you explain years of your life in 100 words?
This is the case for most applicants. We’ll cover activity categories and character limits for 2027, then review sample entries for clinical work, research, volunteering, shadowing, publications, and more. Then you’ll learn about Most Meaningful Experiences, how many activities to include, and what errors to avoid.
Quick answer: AMCAS gives you 15 activities to describe, with a limit of 700 characters each. You can pick up to three of those as Most Meaningful Experiences, and describe each of those in 1,325 characters.
AMCAS stands for American Medical College Application Service. The vast majority of U.S. MD-granting schools use this service. Within the application, the Work and Activities section covers your life outside the classroom. This includes jobs, volunteering, research, awards, publications, hobbies, and more.
Your activities section will be read in conjunction with your grades, MCAT scores, personal statement, and letters of recommendation. Your personal statement will outline your reasons for wanting to be a doctor and the activities section will support that statement with specific evidence. The evidence you provide should be specific, useful, and reflective of the changes you made.
The AAMC has official guidelines for the activities section and you can find them on their Work and Activities.
Your activities section is limited to 15 entries and if you did the same thing in different time periods (i.e. two summers at the same camp) you can add up to four date ranges to that single entry and not take up both slots.
| AMCAS requirement | Rule for the 2027 cycle |
| Maximum entries | 15 |
| Standard activity description | 700 characters |
| Most Meaningful Experiences | Up to 3 |
| Additional Most Meaningful explanation | 1,325 characters per designated experience |
| Minimum meaningful designations | 1 if you have two or more entries |
| Display order | Chronological (you can’t rearrange entries) |
Think of the 700 Characters as the basic activity description. If you select Most Meaningful, you have an additional 1,325 Characters to explain the impact this experience had on you.
If you participated in an activity that is still ongoing, feel free to include it. For eligible experiences, AMCAS asks for completed hours and anticipated hours. So, include any work that you expect to finish before medical school. You can find what dates qualify in the 2027 Work and Activities Guide for Applicants.
What about spaces? Treat them as if they count. Draft your descriptions in a Word doc and then paste them into the app to see how many you have. That number is what you have to work with.
AMCAS groups activities into “experience types.” You have 19 groups for the 2027 cycle, which isn’t too difficult to sort into larger groups.
On the clinical side you have Community Service/Volunteer – Medical/Clinical, Paid Employment – Medical/Clinical, Physician Shadowing/Clinical Observation, and Community Health Advocacy.
Categories include Research/Lab, Publications, Presentations/Posters, Conferences Attended, and Teaching/Tutoring/Teaching Assistant under Research and Academics.
For Service and Leadership Outside of Medicine, there’s Community Service/Volunteer-Not Medical/Clinical, Paid Employment-Not Medical/Clinical, Leadership-Not Listed Elsewhere, and Military Service.
The others are more personal: Artistic Endeavours, Extracurricular Activities, Hobbies, Intercollegiate Athletics, Honours/Awards/Recognitions, and Other.
New this year, Community Health Advocacy replaces Social Justice/Advocacy. The work should aim to alter the systems, policies, and conditions of a community’s health. Trying to shift the health of individuals usually belongs in another category.
Health education campaign example: running a series of CPR workshops would be an example of teaching. Trying to educate and change the health of a community to get access to and use CPR, for example, would be advocacy.
Volunteer work and shadowing get intermixed. If you helped patients or staff, you volunteered. If you shadowed by following a physician and watching, you were shadowing.
If you’re stuck, ask what the activity was mainly for, and do that. Labels that don’t match the activity, or sound more impressive than the other, stand out in a bad way.
Plenty of activities could go in two places. Here are the overlaps applicants ask about most.
A paid research assistant job could be Research/Lab or Paid Employment. Most people pick Research/Lab, since the work was research, and then mention in the description that the job was paid.
A health education campaign could be Teaching/Tutoring or Community Health Advocacy. Ran a series of CPR workshops? That’s teaching. Tried to change health habits or access to care across a whole community? Advocacy is the closer fit.
Hospital volunteering and shadowing get mixed up too. If you helped patients or staff, you were volunteering. If you followed a physician around and watched, you were shadowing.
When you’re stuck, ask what the activity was mainly for. Go with that, even if another label sounds more impressive. A category that doesn’t match the description stands out to readers, and not in a good way.
Most strong entries cover four things, roughly in this order:
You don’t need a dramatic story for every activity. Clear, accurate details about real work go a long way.
Illustrative example (not a real applicant’s entry):
Weak: “Volunteered at a hospital and helped patients. Learned communication skills.”
Stronger: “Welcomed patients at the outpatient desk, helped them complete registration, and directed families to the right departments. The role taught me to give clear directions to people who felt lost in an unfamiliar hospital.”
What changed? The second version tells you where the person stood and what they did all day. So when it gets to the lesson at the end, you believe it.
An IMG Helping Hands mentor will review your entries line by line, cutting filler, sharpening what you actually did, and making every character earn its place.
“Weekly volunteer in the ED of a 300-bed community hospital. I restocked supply carts, brought blankets and water to patients once a nurse approved it. I sat with patients who were waiting for tests/result, or for family to arrive. Many were elderly, so I learned how to introduce myself, explain my role, and pass along patient concerns. I also trained 12 volunteers on ED rules and patient privacy over a 2-year period.”
This applicant had some patient contact but did not do anything medical. You can include the duties you did in your volunteer experience, and how often you were with patients, and what you did with patients. If all you did was observe a doctor do a procedure, don’t write it as if you did it.
“Research assistant in a lab studying how sleep loss affects blood pressure in college students. I recruited participants and collected their home blood pressures. I entered the data into REDCap and ran some basic statistics in R under the postdoc’s supervision. I also drafted the literature review for the manuscript. Data collection for our 80-participant study ended in May 2026, and the team is currently analysing the results.
In just five sentences, the reader understands the research question, methods, and this person’s role and where the study is at. Note, there is no publication and that’s ok. Recruiting participants and writing a lit review are real jobs and should be described that way. Include the status of the project, even if it’s not complete.
“Volunteered every Thursday at a family shelter for three years. I started in the kitchen, then helped to create a homework table after staff said school age kids had no place to study. Currently, I coordinate 6 volunteers, have a supply bin of donated books and calculators, and meet with the shelter’s program manager to set something up for school exams. Some families stay there for months, so I have worked with many students for over a year.”
The consistency shown in volunteering for three years also for three days a week says a lot, but the entry also shows how the needs of the shelter also guided this volunteer opportunity. It never has to call it “rewarding.”
I shadowed a family physician during the rural health clinic’s winter break for 40 hours. I witnessed well visits, diabetes follow-ups, and a conversation about stopping a medication the patient could no longer afford. I did not participate in any patient care activities. In each visit, much of the time was spent on paperwork to get a referral to a specialist, or insurance authorizations. Between patients, the physician shared her rationale for performing certain tasks, which surprised me about how much primary care involves understanding a patient’s life beyond the exam room.
This example of shadowing is brief but informative. The writer was honest to say, “I did not take part in patient care.” The surprises were small, but many, and tell us a lot about a physician’s day. When writing your shadowing example, pick the one thing that surprised you about how a physician’s day actually goes.
“Patel R, Nguyen L, Lee J, Okafor T. Sleep duration and resting blood pressure in undergraduate students: a cohort study. Journal Name. Accepted September 2026.” As the third author, I collected and cleaned the blood pressure data from 80 participants and also wrote the methods section. Additionally, I also revised the discussion section after the reviewers suggested we explained why and when the blood pressure measurements were taken.
Always provide the full citation, the exact status, and the applicant’s role. Status words differ, and it’s important to know what published means. Accepted means the journal accepted it for publication. Submitted means it is still under review. In Preparation means it has not been submitted. Only include yourself as an author if your name is on the paper.
“I presented a poster at the 2026 State Undergraduate Research Symposium, on the relationship between sleep duration and resting blood pressure in college students. I designed the poster and also created the figures using the R programming language. I also presented the poster to about 30 people, including two faculty members who were the judges. The judges asked us questions regarding the limitations of the study, and I also explained the study’s limitation to the best of our knowledge. We later included this in the discussion section of the manuscript we wrote.”
The applicant must provide the topic, role, venue, and most importantly, what the applicant took away from the experience. List all different achievements related to the same project, including both the poster and the paper.
Presidential terms in a club of 180 members.
-Planned 10-12 monthly talks with local doctors
-Established a mentorship program pairing 40 first-year members with junior members
-Managed a $3,000 annual club budget
-Prepared a speech for a leadership seminar for club members
Baked bread on weekends for two years before increasing it to 12 loaves a week. Now bake it to help out a local food pantry.
Keep in mind the non-medical stuff. Organizing members of a club and being able to explain things shows good leadership and teaching skills respectively. A hobby you stick with for years shows discipline and passion.
“I was volunteering in the ED when an elderly man asked me three times when his daughter would be arriving. I gave him the same answer every time, but he would get more frustrated each time. A nurse later on told me that he had dementia. The next time he asked, I decided to ask about his daughter instead. He calmed down and talked to me about his grand kids and how his daughter drives like a maniac, and all of his frustrations about the situation. The shift changed the way I looked at my role. I can’t treat any patient, but now I notice when the answer to the question the patient is asking is not the actual answer that person needs. With new volunteers, I make sure they spend the first minute of their shift determining the actual thing that worries the patient.”
“Four months into a study, I was collecting data when I noticed a few blood pressure log entries that were entered at the wrong time of day. Data entry was part of my job, so I had to tell my postdoc that probably around 15% of our data might be wrong. I was expecting her to get upset. Surprisingly, she showed me how to flag the entries, and we redesigned the logging sheet so that the error couldn’t happen again. I learned that, in research, it is crucial for people to report mistakes. Now, I also pay as much attention on how data is collected as to what data is being collected. I know that some protocols are weak and can break, so I check for those prior to the start of a study.”
“Working at the shelter, my job was to serve dinner and leave. One mother changed that, when she asked if anyone could help with her son’s fractions. That small moment started a Thursday homework table that has been going on for over two years. Being there every week for so long taught me how unstable housing impacted a student’s learning. A student who moved mid-semester could lose a month’s worth of progress and Tutoring wasn’t going to help fix that. I’ve learned to ask students what happened at school that week before we do any worksheet. This work has changed my patience. Showing up every week to do this work shows the families how much I appreciate them and how committed I am.”
Around 15 is the highest number of activities you should list on AMCAS. Generally, schools are more interested in the quality of activities rather than the quantity, and a school commitment for two years is more impressive than a school commitment for one day over the course of two years.
When assessing activities, consider, does this give the admissions committee something the others do not? If two activities overlaps, merge them or take out the one that doesn’t add more info.
Some applicants successfully submit 9 to 10 activities and do really well. A shorter, but more powerful, list of activities is better than a longer, weaker list.
These come up again and again:
Before you submit, check the AAMC instructions on formatting and hours one more time.
Each standard description is limited to 700 characters. Each Most Meaningful description is extended to 1,325 characters.
Only up to three. Two or more of these entries require that you select at least one.
Yes. There is a specific category for hobbies. A hobby you’ve kept up for years can say a lot about your discipline or curiosity. Mention how long you’ve done it and what it actually involves.
You can. Report your completed hours, then add anticipated hours for what you expect to finish before medical school begins. The AAMC Work and Activities Guide for the current cycle explains which end dates are allowed.
Yes. Lots of applicants do. The trick is to give each section a different job. Your activity entry can describe the work, while your personal statement explains how it shaped your path to medicine.
Start by listing everything you’ve genuinely done, not just the medical things. Jobs outside healthcare count. So do caring for a family member, tutoring, long-term volunteering, and hobbies you’ve kept up. Write each one accurately and say what you took from it. Padding the list with short or inflated activities usually backfires, because readers can spot it.
No. Three is the limit, however many entries you have.
Fitting years of work into 700 characters is hard. IMG Helping Hands helps you plan, write, and polish your application so nothing gets lost:
Articles published by IMG Helping Hands are prepared by our team using information from direct experience, publicly available resources, and educational references. AI tools may be used to assist with drafting, proofreading, and formatting; however, all content undergoes review and approval before publication.
The information provided is intended for educational purposes only. Requirements, policies, and processes may change over time. Readers should consult official sources for the most current information.
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