Scribe work good for clinical experience?

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isupsych253

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Is working as a scribe good clinical experience in the eyes of the adcoms? Does the fact that it's a paid job make it look worse than if it was volunteer? Thanks!

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It's clinical experience, yes, but IMO it doesn't carry the same significance as selfess, unpaid, volunteer work.
 
there are other threads about this. someone mentioned they were asked about it at virtually all of their interviews. its a great way to get clinical experience but it won't double as a volunteer position.

I'm about to start as an ER scribe in 2 weeks, very excited :)
 
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ER Scribe for the win. Plus you get paid. If you've already got a multitude of volunteer experiences, this is great because you're not just a fly on the wall. You're working with a physician and you're learning new things every day before you even get to medical school.
 
Is working as a scribe good clinical experience in the eyes of the adcoms? Does the fact that it's a paid job make it look worse than if it was volunteer? Thanks!

Yes, it is clinical experience. I'm not sure if Freigeist is talking about me, but I wrote about experiences from my scribe job in my personal essay and was asked about it in every interview. I feel like I learned a ton at that job. I'm only an M1 but nearly every day I'm able to connect something we're learning about to something from the job. I feel like I know what I'm doing in my medical interviewing class. I know how to write an H&P. I picked up a crapload of anatomy. When we have Radiologic Anatomy I don't feel completely lost because as a scribe I looked at hundreds and hundreds of films and got to talk to the doctor about the interpretations.

Volunteering is a checkbox item that you have to do. Find something that you can do once a week for a least a year. You'll make some friends and be mildly helpful to the organization you're at, but that's likely all.
 
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