It is that time of year again. Applications are almost open for the 2025 Medical School cycle!
You have put in so much hard work and now you get to show off your strengths and passion to the admissions committees! This can be a very exciting time, but also intimidating.
“What do the different sections of the application look like? How can I convey my passion on paper and stand out amongst the other applicants?”
Starting my application was difficult. I felt like there were so many ‘unwritten’ rules about do’s and don’ts for an application. I read books and watched a LOT of YouTube videos to try to get an idea of what a good application would look like but I found that application examples are hard to come by.
I wanted to share my TMDSAS application to give you an idea of what the different sections look like and what strategies I used to try to set my application apart from the 6,000 others.
Before we get into that, I want to emphasize that everyone is different and something that works for me may or may not work for you. I want to share the things that I found helpful when writing my application. By no means am I an application expert. There are so many improvements that I could have made to my own app, but at one point you just have to turn it in!
You got this!
3 Golden Rules to Writing Your Application
My biggest piece of application advice is to create a story. Most applicants will have a similar number of volunteer hours, research, leadership, etc, so how do you stand out from the rest? You have probably heard this throughout undergrad but creating a STORY is what sets you apart.
When filling in your application, don’t just check boxes. For my app, I tried to show the intent and purpose behind each of my activities. Think about how each activity shaped you into the person that you are and how each activity strengthened your desire to become a physician. Through these opportunities, I learned more about medicine and became more inspired to pursue medicine. AND this is so serious! Getting your application ready can be stressful but also really rewarding. Over the past few years, you have grown so much! When writing my app, I enjoyed reflecting on the amazing opportunities I had, and how much closer I was to becoming a physician!
Lastly, show some personality! Again, you are competing against many other applications that might look pretty similar on paper, but what makes you different? I tried to make my application professional to highlight my skills and passion, but also took some liberty to highlight my individuality. I talked about how I picked up crafts during the global pandemic and my love for live music. The application readers are people too and they have hobbies too!
In summary:
- Create a Story
- Don’t Just check boxes
- Show some personality
Resources
TMDSAS
The biggest and most helpful resource for filling out your TMDSAS application will be the TMDSAS website. I was honestly so impressed with how helpful this application system was. Each month they host information sessions and office hours where you can ask questions. All of their videos are recorded and posted to their YouTube.
They even walk you step by step through filling out your application. Telling you exactly how to add your classes, activities, and much more. If you need help filling in your TMDSAS app, this YouTube video, walks you through each step.
YouTube
YouTube was so helpful when I was filling out my application. I watched a bunch of the “application renovation videos” by Doctor Grey where he walks through students’ applications giving advice. It’s nice to see other writing styles and get an idea of what other student’s applications look like.
Remember that your application is yours alone and you don’t have to have it look the same as other students, but it is helpful to see if you are on the right track when writing your app.
Other Pre-med Students
Ask your friends for help! You are going through this application process together so, some of the most helpful resources will be other students that are learning along side you. Share tips and exchange applications to help your friend review and revise.
My Application
And now for my ENTIRE TMDSAS application. I will be going through each section and making comment about what I wrote and why I wrote it!
My Personal Statement
First up is my Personal Statement. I have made a full article about that also posted on my blog so if you are interested go check that out! Here, however, I will revisit the overall theme of my PS so that we can refer to it when looking at the rest of the app.
As an overview, your personal statement should describe your path to medicine. For TMDSAS it must be no longer than 5000 characters INCLUDING spaces.
In summary:
I saw a man who was suffering from some of the consequences of, presumably, diabetes, giving him Gangrene and I felt a calling to help him and people like him. This experience sparked my interest in preventative care, advocacy, and education in healthcare.
I wanted to continue to learn more about these situations and help others in this way so I joined a pre-health club (a HUGE part of my extracurricular activities section on my app) that takes global health trips to provide free care. On my trip, I was met with more experiences that showed the importance of prevention and had an impactful interaction with a doctor who ‘prescribed’ lifestyle modifications to his patient.
Back at school, I joined a lab group that focused on educating individuals about how to manage their chronic disease and gave them resiliency resources to thrive and push through challenges. I learned more about the difficulties that patients face and I took ACTION by myself doing extra things to help them reach their goals. This made me want to be a physician even more !
Lastly, I write about how each of these unique situations made me passionate not only for medicine but for the people that I would be helping!
Personal Characteristics Essay
Heres the prompt:
“Learning from others is enhanced in educational settings that include individuals from diverse backgrounds and experiences. Please describe your personal characteristics (background, talents, skills, ect.) or experiences that would add to the educational experience of others.”
This essay will be whatever you make it. There are so many directions you can go. For this section, I really wanted to use storytelling to catch the attention of the reader and make my application stand out from the rest. In this essay, I chose to emphasize my leadership skills.
(NGL I’m a little proud of this one. Celebrate your wins! 🤠)
I emphasize not only leadership but my leadership style, which is not dictatorship, but rather encouragement, teamwork, and leading by example.
The end is so cheesy, okay. YES, I KNOW. With more time I could have improved it but be patient with yourself! Nothing is perfect.
Tip: My rough draft was all over the place for this one. I wanted to talk about being a Teaching Assistant, and a leader in my pre-health organization and so many other things but I had a friend reel me in. He said it would be better to focus on just a few things and write really well about them. I opted for only 2 leadership examples and tried to talk in-depth about how the skills I strengthened could contribute to my class.
Optional Essay
Alright, now for the optional essay. The unwritten rule here is that this essay is NOT optional. You should do it to be considered for admission.
Here is the TMDSAS prompt:
“Briefly discuss any unique circumstances or life experiences that are relevant to your application which have not previously been presented.”
This essay gave me some trouble because it can be about whatever you want!
Anything.
I know someone who wrote about F1 racing and others who have written about family, sports, crocheting, and more.
In my opinion, the most important thing here is to, like it says, highlight something that makes you unique and stand out amongst the 6000 other apps. Try to highlight qualities that schools are looking for in an applicant. What is an experience that shaped you as a person and will contribute to your career as a physician?
I decided to write about an experience that grew my skills in empathy and compassion for others. I showed leadership, passion, communication, and other skills in different sections of my app so I wanted to bring in experiences that I thought were important to who I was as a person and how I would be a good physician because of that.
This is the only essay I won’t share because each person has their own version that is personal to them. What experience have you had that don’t necessarily show up in the other parts of your app and how will they help you in your future career?
Academic Recognition
In the Academic Recognition section you should include the significant awards achievements, and scholarships that you received during undergraduate school and after.
It is okay if you have not received any. There will be a yes or no question at the heading of this section. If you answer ‘yes’ you will enter your information, if you answer ‘no’ you will continue to the next section.
Here are my awards and descriptions.
For this section you will only have 300 characters, that is words, spaces, and punctuation, to present your ideas. This means you should be to precise and to the point.
For my descriptions, I started off by explaining exactly what the reward was, and what it was given for. When applicable, I showed how many people received the reward to highlight the significance and importance.
Non-Academic Recognition
In the non-academic section you should include awards and honors given to you outside of school. These will also be 300 characters.
In this section included an award I received for being a Teaching Assistant and a Leadership award received in college. I did not consider these academic because they were rewarded for time out of the classroom!
Activity Descriptions
Now we are entering activity description territory.
Leadership
In the leadership section, you will include roles in which you took the lead or a group or project. For this section, you will have 500 characters.
One of my biggest take aways from watch ‘application renovation’ videos was to add personality and stories to your activity descriptions. Here is where you can make you application pop and stand out!
Some of the above activity descriptions are boring. You want to include the the skills and take aways you learned from this job but also make it stand out. It can be hard to find a good balance.
I think that my best activity description from this section is the ‘GMT president’ description. I began the text with narration of the GMT officers in a meeting, collaborating on a leadership exercise I implemented, I described why I implemented it, and then finished my description with the responsibleness that I held in the role. I felt like this description pulled the curtain back on a ‘day in my life’ of being president and helped speak to not only the role but the initiatives I took to create a strong team!
Going back, I would have added more personality to the other activities in this section, using a similar framework to above.
Research Activities
This section also includes a yes or no question. If you answer no, you will continue to the next section.
Nothing special here. I wrote more about this role in my ‘most impactful’ section. Here, I mostly just describe my role and responsibilities in detail. You have the option to add publications as well. I was not published so I answered ‘no’ to this question.
Healthcare Activities
In health care activities I added my shadowing hours. For shadowing I made sure to include the name of the physician, the place they worked at and the number of hours I shadowed them for.
I included a medical trip to the Dominican Republic, work experience as a Medical Assistant, and Volunteer work at the pediatric clinic.
(I could have included pediatric volunteering under community service, but I chose to put it under healthcare experience.)
Volunteer Activities
I really liked the story I told for my GMT volunteer experience. It was fun to describe the narrative of kids having fun learning about science and to again show another ‘day in my life.’
Volunteering on the farm was really important to me. It was only 30 hours, but it felt nice to add another dimension to my application and talk about one of my hobbies.
Extracurricular Activities
I had fun on the extracurricular Activities section! You can tell schools more about what you did in your free time during medical school.
For the first activity, I talk about GMT again, but this time it is about my involvement in the organization and not about my leadership. For leadership roles you are not allotted a space to fill in hours, so you can add your hours devoted to an organization under this section.
Show your personality in this section! You don’t have to just put activities that ‘check boxes.’
I picked my top 3 fun and not school related activities and included them here. Reading and podcasts were a HUGE part of my undergrad life, I loved attending concerts, and I picked up sewing and designing clothes during the pandemic.
One of my friends who is a current medical student told me his favorite description was the one I wrote about sewing. He told me I should model a lot of my other activity descriptions with the same structure because it really stands out!
Employment
For the employment section add any activities that you were paid for. You may notice overlaps in my descriptions. TMDSAS allows overlap for Healthcare, employment, and leadership experience. See the TMDSAS application guide for more info! Just make sure that you write a different description to highlight a different aspect of your experience.
My work experience was not all healthcare centered. I picked up my high school restaurant job when I went back home for the summers and worked as an Uber Eats driver during the pandemic.
These job may not seem like they would contribute much to my skills as a physician, but they did! Make the most out of your experiences and show how you grew from them.
I created imagery around my work as a server and learned resiliency while I was getting lost in neighborhoods as an Uber Driver.
Even the smallest things can shape you!
Most Meaningful Experiences
For this section, pick the top 3 most meaningful experiences to you. I chose my research, my pre-med organization, and reading and podcasts.
Including the reading and podcasts in ‘most meaningful’ may have been slightly unconventional, but I truly felt that my outside research on health and wellness had one of the biggest impacts in shaping what I wanted to do as a physician. It also influenced me to make this blog and have a platform to talk about health!
In this section you have 500 more characters to show you passion, growth, and experience!
Planned Activities
In the planned activities section you are wanting to do during the application cycle. Make sure to include things that you could talk about during your medical school interviews, because they will ask you what you are up to!
I struggled on this section because I was not 100% sure what I was going to do in my gap year so I made my best guess. I actually talk to an admissions officer for Dell Medical School about this when volunteering one day, and he said this it is completely okay for your plans to change and just to make your best guess of what you will be doing.
The biggest thing here is to make sure you continue to do the things that you love and will get you closer to be a doctor. Admission does not want to see you discontinue involvement in organizations because you already applied. The things you do during your application year matter too!
I found that my experiences during my gap year (working as a Medical Assistant full time) were some of my most impactful during interviews, because it allowed to to reflect on what I had learned about the medical system and provide insight into issues and wisdom I had gained from it!
That brings us to a close on my TMDSAS application. I hope posting my primary will help you as you go through this process. Remember that every application looks different and that I’m NOT an expert but just trying to use the tips I gained along the way to help others.
Reading back over my application, there are things that I know I could have changed or improved, but you only have so much time, so do your best and show your passion!
Good Luck!
♡ Z
Writing Secondaries? Here the link to my Secondary Applications Blog
Closing Notes
Must DOS!
Review, Review, Review
Read through your application as MANY times as you can. Print it out on a piece of paper or download a pdf before you turn it in. Read through it out loud, have a friend or parent read it. Trust me! Each time I read through my application I would find little typos and mistakes. I’m sure even after doing this dozens of times there may be one or two little things in here, but I’m so glad to have caught the big mistakes. Big typos can convey rushedness and laziness so just make sure you double check!
DOS
Start early! The earlier the better 4-5 months before the app opens just jot down some of the activities you have done during undergrad and beyond that you want to put on your application. I started writing mine in notion and it was SUPER helpful. A blog/video on how to organize your activities a head of time will be coming out soon. It’s just nice to have a list early so you can ruminate about them on the back burner. What was you more impactful part of that experience? How did it shape you. I honestly forgot about a lot of the little things I did or how many hours I did them for so it was nice to gradually compile that information.
My application did not look like this upon first glance. Wrote and revised and asked for advice and watched YouTube videos, read articles, and revised again. I would really recommend getting a friend that has already gone through this process to help you out, just by reading through an essay or looking at your activities section. This was a pivotal part in my writing process because my friend gave me invaluable advice about the little details in my application. For things like this the little things matter. I am so grateful for his help!
Zoe Martinez 
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