<p>Do the main important extracurricular activities in the last year of high school count in medical school extracurricular activities??</p>
<p>Some of the rly good ECs were done after i got accepted into university.. such as winning a science competition at a national or international level...</p>
<p>Do they count?</p>
<p>If you win Intel or something, then definitely put it. If it’s a little known competition, then it’s not going to be worth it. Med schools won’t care.</p>
<p>such as like International Brain Bee (Neuroscience Olympiad)?</p>
<p>If you win it, it might be worth putting down later. Truthfully, I and probably med school adcoms will have no idea what that is.</p>
<p>how much emphasis do they put on ECs?</p>
<p>They place a significant emphasis on COLLEGE ECs. Yeah it is a pain to restart, but such is life. You’ll do it again in medical school.</p>
<p>In order for a high school accomplishment to be worth listing, it has to be HUGE (e.g., as was said earlier, intel finalist). I googled the IBB and spent a couple mins on the site. In my opinion, unless you’re the national or international champion, I don’t think it qualifies. I’m not even 100% it would if you were champion. This competition looks like it’s just straight memorization. If you’re interested in neuroscience, you should be involved in research, shadowing neurologists, and volunteering with an organization that deals with neurology patients or something else in college and excelling in that. After four years of undergrad, you should have enough accomplishments that you don’t need to continue to list that you partook in a high school quiz bowl where the topic was neuroscience.</p>
<p>If an essay requires you to talk about how you became interested in medicine, and you would like to mention your experiences in IBB, that would be appropriate, but that is very different from listing it in the activities section.</p>
<p>ohh okay. thanks!! what about publishing my own neuroscience research paper with a couple of other professors in that field? Is that considered as “BIG” when applying for med?</p>
<p>If it’s published in a peer reviewed journal it’ll follow you for life. Put it on your college apps, med school apps, residency apps, fellowship apps, and so on.</p>