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Tracking Activities

Each student will be preparing for their pre-health application for multiple semesters! In order to help you manage your experiences, activities, and application components throughout your pre-health journey we have created or recommend the following resources.

It is strongly recommended to document your activities and involvement since you will need to summarize them professionally and meaningfully on the application(s), and incorporate health/medical terminology (and the 15 Core Competencies for Entering Medical Students, in four categories: Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Thinking and Reasoning, and Science). Keep a professional journal where you can reflect on your experiences, what you learned, and how you’d apply it. It will be much easier to do this during your experiences, than trying to recall what you learned a year or more later, at the time of application.

Begin developing rapport with your instructors during your FIRST year, especially with science faculty: sit in the front of lectures, ask questions, volunteer, and regularly attend office hours and study sessions, become a TA/lab assistant. Get to know them genuinely, and in turn, they will get to know you!

Unlike volunteering and shadowing in high school, there is NO official paperwork that is required for proving these experiences. Therefore, it is important that you keep track of your activities for yourself. The following are possible options:

 

PreMD Tracker App

The PreMD Tracker App is available completely for FREE and allows students to track their GPA, experiences and more! Only available for Android phones.

More information about the PreMD Tracker App.

Personal Journal
Some students may prefer to keep a personal journal (either hard copy, word doc, blog, etc.). If creating your own journal tracking system you will want to be sure to keep track of the following information regarding your experiences:

  • Where: List the name and place your shadowing experience occurred.
  • Who: List the name of the physician you shadowed or the individuals you volunteered/worked with.
  • When: List the dates and hours spent shadowing, volunteering, or working.
  • What you did: Write a short synopsis of what you did during that day.
  • Your observations: Remember, often admissions committees care more about what you learned from your experience that what you specifically did. How did this experience impact you? What did you like or dislike? How might it make you a better health care provider in the future?
  • Contact information: List contact information for the office/physician that you shadowed or worked with. If your contact information is the physician's personal contact information, you might also want to get the contact information for their office/administrative staff, as that physician will most likely have many students shadowing him or her, and might not remember you specifically, so make sure that you have additional contact information.

Create an account on the application portal that you are planning to apply to in the future and become familiar with the application (More information to come!)