Five Things To Avoid In Your Experience Descriptions

1. In your 700/600 character descriptions, do not tell stories in your short descriptions. You cannot develop a story in such a short space. Instead, follow this structure:

   Sentence One: BIG PICTURE-What did you do? Describe your role (I led a team..), context (in a busy urban hospital), and relevance (contributing to a project on ...).

   Last Sentence: Your takeaway. What did you learn from this experience. Each experience should have a unique takeaway.

   In between first and last sentence: Lead into the takeaway by more specifically highlighting the tasks, accomplishments, skills, etc you gained from this role. For example, if your takeaway is that leading a research team gave you more confidence presenting to a large audience, the middle sentences would have something about the presentations you gave.

2. Whatever your experience category is, do not write about something totally different. For example, if you classify something as Leadership, you should talk about something related to leadership in the description. Once you have all your writing done, scan for words that you might have used more than once in a description, then do a Command F to see how many times you used that word throughout the entire piece. I often find that people get comfortable with the same words. Do a search for: Patient, Health, Community.

3. Limit the use of phrases like "I learned the importance of..." or "reinforced the value of ...". These are extremely overused phrases. Try pushing yourself to say it differently.

4. Don't make all your takeaways be that the experienced inspired you to be a doctor/dentist, etc. Make the takeaways be about your attributes, skills, insight. They already know you want to be an X. Repeating it over and over doesn't make your application stronger.

5. Don't repeat the same information from the form in your description. For example, your experience title should be your job title, such as "Research Assistant". You don't have to start with "As a Research Assistant". It also includes the location, organization and dates. You don't have to repeat all of that in your description. Just jump right into your role.