Pre-Health Prep Series: Pre-Professional Competencies for Medical School

Like many professional programs in healthcare, medical schools are looking for more than applicants with high grades, stellar entrance exam scores, and a collection of coursework that has provided them with a broad educational background. These programs are also wanting to accept applicants that they know will be able to balance the rigors of medical school with serving their communities and future patients. They want life-long learners and problem-solvers who are compassionate, empathetic, and devoted to being good colleagues and great practitioners.

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) as designated 15 core competencies that all applicants entering medical programs should have. This list of competencies was developed after reviewing the medical education and employment literature extensively and seeking input from numerous advisory panels and medical professionals.

While each medical program has their own review process for evaluating and selecting applicants, most programs use a flexible system, known as holistic review, to help admissions committees balance the experiences, attributes, and academic metrics of the applicants that they are considering for entrance into their programs. (We will likely talk more about the holistic review process in a future blogpost, but if you are interested, you can read more on the subject by going here.) The AAMC's 15 Core Competencies for Entering Medical Students has been used by many medical schools to help them articulate what they are looking for in applicants.

This list isn't intended to be used as a checklist for getting into medical school. Many applicants simply will not have mastered all 15 competencies by the time they apply to medical school and that is perfectly okay and normal. Instead, this list provides a framework to consider and to use as you communicate your experiences during the application process (and on interviews) to demonstrate your readiness for a professional program.

The list of core competencies is as follows (taken directly from AAMC):

Pre-Professional Competencies

• Service Orientation: Demonstrates a desire to help others and sensitivity to others’ needs and feelings; demonstrates a desire to alleviate others’ distress; recognizes and acts on his/her responsibilities to society; locally, nationally, and globally.
• Social Skills: Demonstrates an awareness of others’ needs, goals, feelings, and the ways that social and behavioral cues affect peoples’ interactions and behaviors; adjusts behaviors appropriately in response to these cues; treats others with respect.
• Cultural Competence: Demonstrates knowledge of socio-cultural factors that affect interactions and behaviors; shows an appreciation and respect for multiple dimensions of diversity; recognizes and acts on the obligation to inform one’s own judgment; engages diverse and competing perspectives as a resource for learning, citizenship, and work; recognizes and appropriately addresses bias in themselves and others; interacts effectively with people from diverse backgrounds.
• Teamwork: Works collaboratively with others to achieve shared goals; shares information and knowledge with others and provides feedback; puts team goals ahead of individual goals.
• Oral Communication: Effectively conveys information to others using spoken words and sentences; listens effectively; recognizes potential communication barriers and adjusts approach or clarifies information as needed.
• Ethical Responsibility to Self and Others: Behaves in an honest and ethical manner; cultivates personal and academic integrity; adheres to ethical principles and follows rules and procedures; resists peer pressure to engage in unethical behavior and encourages others to behave in honest and ethical ways; develops and demonstrates ethical and moral reasoning.
• Reliability and Dependability: Consistently fulfills obligations in a timely and satisfactory manner; takes responsibility for personal actions and performance.
• Resilience and Adaptability: Demonstrates tolerance of stressful or changing environments or situations and adapts effectively to them; is persistent, even under difficult situations; recovers from setbacks.
• Capacity for Improvement: Sets goals for continuous improvement and for learning new concepts and skills; engages in reflective practice for improvement; solicits and responds appropriately to feedback.

Thinking and Reasoning Competencies

• Critical Thinking: Uses logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions, or approaches to problems.
• Quantitative Reasoning: Applies quantitative reasoning and appropriate mathematics to describe or explain phenomena in the natural world.
• Scientific Inquiry: Applies knowledge of the scientific process to integrate and synthesize information, solve problems and formulate research questions and hypotheses; is facile in the language of the sciences and uses it to participate in the discourse of science and explain how scientific knowledge is discovered and validated.
• Written Communication: Effectively conveys information to others using written words and sentences.

Science Competencies

• Living Systems: Applies knowledge and skill in the natural sciences to solve problems related to molecular and macro systems including biomolecules, molecules, cells, and organs.
• Human Behavior: Applies knowledge of the self, others, and social systems to solve problems related to the psychological, socio-cultural, and biological factors that influence health and well-being.

As an applicant, you should be thinking about which of these competencies you have mastered and which of these competencies could use a little work. For areas where you aren't as strong, you should be taking the initiative to seek out professional development and personal growth opportunities that can help you hone these skills. Successful applicants are able to demonstrate that they are competent in each of these defined areas by using examples in their personal essays and in their responses during interviews. To help you self-reflect and strengthen your competencies, the AAMC has created an Anatomy of an Applicant workbook, which you can access for free by going here.