COVID = 0 Clinical hours

[suffokatie]

I apologize in advance for the long story but I am desperate for advice as well as a bit of reassurance.

I am a nontraditional student and graduated with an MA in Art History in 2019. I realized pretty quickly that I wanted to go into medicine and so began taking all of my prerequisite courses while teaching at a local community college. I began volunteering at a few places including one that works with individuals living with HIV/AIDS that I still volunteer at weekly. I had also attempted to volunteer or shadow at a few hospitals, unfortunately, the ones I spoke with had a wait-list and were giving priority to university students. While waiting for a spot to open up I continued volunteering, teaching, and taking all of my prerequisite courses. A few months after graduation, I found out that a family member had been financially abusing my grandmother and so I began taking care of her as well. Around the time that things began to calm down with that entire situation is when the pandemic began. However, I continued to reach out to doctors, hospitals, and anywhere I could think of to see if it would be possible to get any sort of shadowing or clinical experience but as expected, no one was accepting volunteers.

To give a bit of background, my cumulative GPA is 3.84 (3.8 from undergrad and 4.0 from grad school) and my science GPA is 3.91. While I have taken most of my prerequisites, I was unable to take Physics before taking the MCAT and will be completing Phys1 & 2 over the summer. Thus far, I have 340 hours of volunteer experience as well as tons of teaching and leadership experience. I have spoken at quite a few conferences and have three published papers. Unfortunately, the papers and conferences were all for Art History and have nothing to do with the sciences. I am now a week and a half away from taking the MCAT and I am scoring 508 pretty consistently. I know that this is not a phenomenal score and on top of it all, I have zero clinical or relevant research experience thanks to the pandemic. I wanted to know if my resume and GPA are good enough to make me a competitive candidate?

Thank you in advance!!

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[alm414]

I think having 0 clinical experience will be a death sentence for your application to be honest. You need to show that you know you want to be a doctor, and I don't see how you can do that if you've never worked/volunteered with patients in a hospital/clinic around doctors. The good news is the rest of your application seems really good (the MCAT is not great but I don't think it is prohibitively low), and if you delay your application one year to rack up clinical experiences (either paid or volunteer) I think you'll be in a great position to apply next year.

 

[Goro]

The above post just needs /thread.

OP, you either wait until COVID is over, or try getting a scribing job, or be a screener/contact tracer.

Also, without an MCAT score, your competitiveness is impossible to calculate.

 

[LondonVibes]

The above post just needs /thread.

OP, you either wait until COVID is over, or try getting a scribing job, or be a screener/contact tracer.

Also, without an MCAT score, your competitiveness is impossible to calculate.

Screener would be undebateably clinical and contact tracer would depend on the ADCOM member, correct?

 

[Goro]

Screener would be undebateably clinical and contact tracer would depend on the ADCOM member, correct?

Yes

 

[suffokatie]

The above post just needs /thread.

OP, you either wait until COVID is over, or try getting a scribing job, or be a screener/contact tracer.

Also, without an MCAT score, your competitiveness is impossible to calculate.

Thank you!!

 

[suffokatie]

I think having 0 clinical experience will be a death sentence for your application to be honest. You need to show that you know you want to be a doctor, and I don't see how you can do that if you've never worked/volunteered with patients in a hospital/clinic around doctors. The good news is the rest of your application seems really good (the MCAT is not great but I don't think it is prohibitively low), and if you delay your application one year to rack up clinical experiences (either paid or volunteer) I think you'll be in a great position to apply next year.

I appreciate your feedback! I do agree and have been worried about the same thing in terms of how do I prove that being a doctor is what I want to do if I haven't volunteered/worked around them. I will go ahead and still take the MCAT next week and then take a year to get some clinical hours and boost my resume. Gah. I'm too impatient and hate that I'm putting my family's life on hold for yet another year but I've had the sneaking suspicion that despite the pandemic, medical schools could only be so understanding when it came to clinical hours, and having none on my resume would be a deal-breaker.

 

[suffokatie]

The above post just needs /thread.

OP, you either wait until COVID is over, or try getting a scribing job, or be a screener/contact tracer.

Also, without an MCAT score, your competitiveness is impossible to calculate.

This may be a silly question, but someone mentioned that my ~300 hrs of clinical volunteer experience from HS could be included on my resume. However, they would have been from 16years ago. I didn't include this in my initial post as this to me seemed like it was irrelevant considering how many years it has been but would appreciate your opinion on this matter.

 

[Goro]

This may be a silly question, but someone mentioned that my ~300 hrs of clinical volunteer experience from HS could be included on my resume. However, they would have been from 16years ago. I didn't include this in my initial post as this to me seemed like it was irrelevant considering how many years it has been but would appreciate your opinion on this matter.

You were a child then. I want to know what your experiences are now oh, because your perceptions have changed

 

[suffokatie]

You were a child then. I want to know what your experiences are now oh, because your

That makes total sense and I definitely want to show how passionate I am about this career. Thank you again for taking the time to respond and offer advice!