How to Talk (and Write) About Your Activities for Medical School Interviews and Applications

“So, tell me about a time when you…” 

During the medical school application process, so many different questions and prompts can begin with that phrase. Whether it be a prompt during your primary or secondary applications, or even an on-the-fly question during an interview, you will 100% encounter the opportunity to talk about your experiences in different settings. And, if you’re anything like me, you’ll feel a little overwhelmed by the mental work you must do to answer these questions. You have to first identify an experience or situation that fits the question at hand. Then, at the same time, you have to figure out what you want to say within a supposed “Goldilocks” range of just the right amount of detail (not too little to leave the interviewer/reader confused and wanting more, but also not too much to cause boredom or overshoot word limits). If you find yourself in this situation, I feel your pain.  

Answering these questions can be a little tricky but fear not!

There’s an easy framework that you can use to guide your writing and discussions that both removes a lot of worry and keeps you on task. I like to call it "The Ebenezer Scrooge Framework."

If that name sounds silly to you, good! That makes it more memorable. In this framework, we’ll use Charles Dickens’ idea of the past, present, and future in storytelling to provide a 360° view of our experiences.

In other words, we’ll talk about 3 main areas to focus on in your writing/verbal explanations:

1. What I did
2. What I currently have taken away from the experience, and
3. How I wish for this experience to continue in medical school/my future career.

Let’s walk through an example so I can show you what I mean.   

The Ghost of Experience Past: What I Did 

For this part of our description, we’ll talk about what we did during the experience. As you can expect, admissions committees will want to know what you actually did during the experience that you’re choosing to tell them about. For the sake of this blog post, I’ll use an example of a student (let’s call them Cambry Coach) who worked as teaching assistant during undergrad.

Now, the key is you want to keep this portion concise yet detailed: you want to effectively describe what you did, but you also want to give yourself space/time to discuss your takeaways of your experience (how to do so will be discussed in the following sections). For example, if you were an EMT, take a sentence or two to talk about the tangible tasks that you did in your role. If you were a part time DJ, briefly describe how you discovered the hobby and the events that you worked.

Let’s look at some examples for Cambry:

• “During college, I worked as a TA for the Intro to Biology course for premedical students for 2 years. My duties involved hosting weekly office hours for students, leading weekly review sessions, and grading exams.”
• “To help make the material most understandable for students, I employed different teaching strategies to reframe difficult concepts and create useful mnemonics.”
• “In office hours, instead of simply revising the incorrect portions of students’ explanations, I first highlighted correct components to then build off of that foundation.”  

The Ghost of Experience Present: What I Currently Have Taken Away from the Experience 

For this part, this is where you talk about how this experience affected and changed you. Here is where you can speak on hard skills (e.g., basic science lab techniques, coding skills, patient assessment skills, etc.) or soft skills (e.g., time management, interpersonal skills, active listening, etc.) that you developed through the experience. This portion should take up most of your character limit and/or speaking time; it allows you to speak directly to what type of applicant/student/person you are because of the experience.

Below is an example of how Cambry can highlight current takeaways in their responses:

• “From managing these different responsibilities, I have improved my time management skills.”
• “I have come to love the continued learning that the job entails. With each pass of the material, I have relearned and reinforced core concepts that I’ll use in medical school.”
• “Most importantly, I have improved my communication skills as I developed new ways to explain material to students. I’ve also come more adept in sharing the knowledge I’ve acquired and confident in my ability to be an educator.”  

The Ghost of Experience Future: How I Wish for This Experience to Continue in Medical School/My Future Career 

This portion is where you tie it all together. Admissions committees are ultimately looking for where applicants who will contribute to the diversity of their class in experience, thought, and action. By including how you wish to take the lessons from your experience and apply them in medical school and beyond, you can directly show reviewers and interviewers how you will uniquely contribute to their incoming class (which I know you will!). This part does not need to be super extensive or detailed, as admission committees know your interests are ever evolving. Even just a quick sentence or phrase can help bolster your description of experiences more than you can imagine.

Here are some final examples from Cambry:

• “It’s been rewarding to pay forward the great teaching I received when I took the class, and I hope to continue to teach in my future career.”
• “I aspire to continue to improve my teaching skills as a tutor in medical school to be a better educator in my career.”

Some final pieces of advice...

First, the main source of information that admission committees have about you is what you write in your application. Whatever you write, make sure that you know it well and can talk about it. It makes your life a whole lot easier in the long run. Second, keep your writing and descriptions as true to source as possible. Don’t feel the need to exaggerate and stretch the truth; this makes your story harder to convey consistently, and it makes it harder for your authenticity to shine through.  

Additionally, you don’t need to go through all 3 parts of the framework for every single one of your experiences. You can adjust it and tweak it as you best see fit. This framework is more so a guide that I developed during my application cycle that helped me to consistently communicate the important details of my experiences in my primary and secondary applications. It also gave me a mental script to run through during my interviews so that I could organize my thoughts when nerves were high, and my mind would race a mile a minute. 

I hope this Ebenezer Scrooge framework is something that will stick with you and help you as you navigate your process to applying to medical school. Regardless of where you are in your journey, be it early along your pre-med journey or in the throes of an application cycle, thinking about your experiences in past, present, and future manner will be very beneficial. Give yourself the space to reflect on your experiences and identify your takeaways from each one; you’ll see the quality of your writing and responses improve in real time.