Does when volunteering and experience hours happen matter?

[777137]

I had minimal hours shadowing during school, I just have minimal EC's and ~600 hours of research from college, when I apply next year, most of my clinical and volunteering hours will be from my year after I have graduated. I will end up with ~1500 hours scribing, ~300 clinical volunteering, and ~300 non-clinical volunteering hours, almost all of which will be from this past year. Does it matter when these hours came?

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[lpp06]

You're proactively addressing a deficit in your application so I don't think there are any detrimental aspects of completing these hours after you graduated. Although an adcom would look favorably on having these commitments during undergraduate because it would have highlighted your time management and workload capacity (if you maintained good grades), they wouldn't discount their intrinsic value if pursued after the fact.

 

[Lost In Transcription]

I had minimal hours shadowing during school, I just have minimal EC's and ~600 hours of research from college, when I apply next year, most of my clinical and volunteering hours will be from my year after I have graduated. I will end up with ~1500 hours scribing, ~300 clinical volunteering, and ~300 non-clinical volunteering hours, almost all of which will be from this past year. Does it matter when these hours came?

Probably not if you can talk about them in a meaningful manner and have thoughtfully considered how they impact your view of medicine and the people it serves.

 

[Gurby]

I am not an AdCom, but I disagree with the above... I think ideally, clinical experience and shadowing should come as early as possible in a premed's career. Think about the story your application tells. It makes sense if you shadow and gain clinical exposure first, and then say "I liked what I saw, so I decided to pursue medicine". If you devote 4+ years to the premed track and only then investigate what medicine is really like, at that point you're so invested in it that it would be hard to change course and do something else. Your mind is pretty much already made up at that point, and you're just checking boxes. Whether anyone actually reads into it that much or whether it actually matters to AdCom's, I'm not sure.

 

[Catalystik]

I had minimal hours shadowing during school, I just have minimal EC's and ~600 hours of research from college, when I apply next year, most of my clinical and volunteering hours will be from my year after I have graduated. I will end up with ~1500 hours scribing, ~300 clinical volunteering, and ~300 non-clinical volunteering hours, almost all of which will be from this past year. Does it matter when these hours came?

Over how many months will you have obtained these last-minute clinically-related ECs? What other ECs's (and related hours) do you have from college that suggest that you might have had an interest in medicine earlier in your life than 12 months prior to applying?

 

[Lost In Transcription]

I am not an AdCom, but I disagree with the above... I think ideally, clinical experience and shadowing should come as early as possible in a premed's career. Think about the story your application tells. It makes sense if you shadow and gain clinical exposure first, and then say "I liked what I saw, so I decided to pursue medicine". If you devote 4+ years to the premed track and only then investigate what medicine is really like, at that point you're so invested in it that it would be hard to change course and do something else. Your mind is pretty much already made up at that point, and you're just checking boxes. Whether anyone actually reads into it that much or whether it actually matters to AdCom's, I'm not sure.

Our answers are the same.

This is what I meant by impacting your view of medicine.

 

[777137]

Over how many months will you have obtained these last-minute clinically-related ECs? What other ECs's (and related hours) do you have from college that suggest that you might have had an interest in medicine earlier in your life than 12 months prior to applying?

12 months for the last minute stuff. EC's are pretty bad in college. My freshman and sophomore year I have like 250 hours in a housing org and like 100 as VP of my dorm. I didn't do anything my junior and senior year other than ~600 hours of research during my summers. I tended to treat school as being more important than everything else so I at least ended with a 3.86cGPA and 3.93sGPA.

And for reasons to go into medicine, I first became interested in high school when I blew out my elbow, which I have been dealing with the repercussions of for 5 years now. I did some shadowing in HS and some during college (like 15ish hours maybe, watched a 7 hour surgery, too) and then got lyme disease as a rising senior which I then struggled with for about 6 months, or most of my senior year.

I was interested in medicine, but didn't really get serious about it until a couple years ago. What I have been doing definitely has given me better insight into the field and confirmed my desire to go into medicine. I really like working as a scribe and the volunteering that I do is really cool, so I've noticed a pretty big difference in myself the past couple months even. I knew I wasn't ready to apply this or last cycle and that I wasn't mature enough so I am taking time off for that reason.

Edit: If it matters, I worked ~40-50 hours a week during my summers, usually nights, except for soph-->junior year.

 

[Catalystik]

12 months for the last minute stuff. EC's are pretty bad in college. My freshman and sophomore year I have like 250 hours in a housing org and like 100 as VP of my dorm. I didn't do anything my junior and senior year other than ~600 hours of research during my summers. I tended to treat school as being more important than everything else so I at least ended with a 3.86cGPA and 3.93sGPA.

And for reasons to go into medicine, I first became interested in high school when I blew out my elbow, which I have been dealing with the repercussions of for 5 years now. I did some shadowing in HS and some during college (like 15ish hours maybe, watched a 7 hour surgery, too) and then got lyme disease as a rising senior which I then struggled with for about 6 months, or most of my senior year.

I was interested in medicine, but didn't really get serious about it until a couple years ago. What I have been doing definitely has given me better insight into the field and confirmed my desire to go into medicine. I really like working as a scribe and the volunteering that I do is really cool, so I've noticed a pretty big difference in myself the past couple months even. I knew I wasn't ready to apply this or last cycle and that I wasn't mature enough so I am taking time off for that reason.

Edit: If it matters, I worked ~40-50 hours a week during my summers, usually nights, except for soph-->junior year.

I'm glad you have something to mention that shows medicine wasn't a spur of the moment, last-minute decision.

 

[777137]

I'm glad you have something to mention that shows medicine wasn't a spur of the moment, last-minute decision.

Lol ya it was immature of me not to get more involved earlier, but at least I am realizing it now. I could also mention my families long line of cancer (we have a couple of specifically identified genes that we all carry) which has garnered a huge interest in oncology for me. But a lot of my experiences were either first hand or through family, medicine has had a big impact on my life, so its definitely not a thing I decided on recently, just something that I have become increasingly more involved recently.