Clinical volunteering/experience?

[Barely hanging on]

Hello!

I'm a pre-med in my second year of undergrad and I was wondering about the clinical volunteering part of the med school application. I work full time right now, as well as go to school full time as well as mentor a Little Sister through Big Brothers Big Sisters as often as I can.

Clearly, I don't have much room (right now) for clinical volunteering also. A couple years ago I worked as an assistant director in an adult day care facility for a little over a year which gave me up close and personal contact with our clients in the way of exercise, bathroom visits, activities, med passing, etc. I've also worked on the administrative side of a home care and hospice company for 8 years.

Is my experience at the daycare enough to say that I have "patient exposure" or should I be doing clinical volunteering also since that experience will be kind of old by the time I'm applying?

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[Goro]

I personally consider it to be clinical (and very laudable), but other Adcoms may disagree.

Hello!

I'm a pre-med in my second year of undergrad and I was wondering about the clinical volunteering part of the med school application. I work full time right now, as well as go to school full time as well as mentor a Little Sister through Big Brothers Big Sisters as often as I can.

Clearly, I don't have much room (right now) for clinical volunteering also. A couple years ago I worked as an assistant director in an adult day care facility for a little over a year which gave me up close and personal contact with our clients in the way of exercise, bathroom visits, activities, med passing, etc. I've also worked on the administrative side of a home care and hospice company for 8 years.

Is my experience at the daycare enough to say that I have "patient exposure" or should I be doing clinical volunteering also since that experience will be kind of old by the time I'm applying?

 

[LizzyM]

Hello!

I'm a pre-med in my second year of undergrad and I was wondering about the clinical volunteering part of the med school application. I work full time right now, as well as go to school full time as well as mentor a Little Sister through Big Brothers Big Sisters as often as I can.

Clearly, I don't have much room (right now) for clinical volunteering also. A couple years ago I worked as an assistant director in an adult day care facility for a little over a year which gave me up close and personal contact with our clients in the way of exercise, bathroom visits, activities, med passing, etc. I've also worked on the administrative side of a home care and hospice company for 8 years.

Is my experience at the daycare enough to say that I have "patient exposure" or should I be doing clinical volunteering also since that experience will be kind of old by the time I'm applying?

Are you a non-traditional student who has worked full-time after High School graduation and then went back to college?

Your service as a mentor to a Little Sister is terrific and shows that you are a service-oriented person who volunteers to help someone who can't do it on their own. That's great.

The next question that comes up in evaluating your application for admission to medical school is: does this applicant know what it is to work in a clinical setting and take care of patients? does this applicant have a realistic idea of what physicians do and how the health care team works together to care for patients? You can get this experience through shadowing AND volunteering and/or employment but some of the experience should be in environments where physicians are working. The adult daycare facility was a good employment opportunity but it is hard to consider it a clinical setting when you called the people you cared for "clients" rather than "patients". Sometimes people are patients and sometimes they aren't. Clinical experiences involve "patients" which makes some experiences with older adults a bit tricky to decipher.

Get yourself some shadowing with physicians to be sure that pre-med is the right place for you. If you can switch to a job in a clinical setting, that would be another way to get experience to be sure you are headed on the right career path before you get too far down the road and decide you've made a terrible mistake.

 

[Barely hanging on]

Are you a non-traditional student who has worked full-time after High School graduation and then went back to college?

Your service as a mentor to a Little Sister is terrific and shows that you are a service-oriented person who volunteers to help someone who can't do it on their own. That's great.

The next question that comes up in evaluating your application for admission to medical school is: does this applicant know what it is to work in a clinical setting and take care of patients? does this applicant have a realistic idea of what physicians do and how the health care team works together to care for patients? You can get this experience through shadowing AND volunteering and/or employment but some of the experience should be in environments where physicians are working. The adult daycare facility was a good employment opportunity but it is hard to consider it a clinical setting when you called the people you cared for "clients" rather than "patients". Sometimes people are patients and sometimes they aren't. Clinical experiences involve "patients" which makes some experiences with older adults a bit tricky to decipher.

Get yourself some shadowing with physicians to be sure that pre-med is the right place for you. If you can switch to a job in a clinical setting, that would be another way to get experience to be sure you are headed on the right career path before you get too far down the road and decide you've made a terrible mistake.

I graduated high school in '06 and went to college but I didn't have a solid direction that I wanted to go in, so I sort of gave up on it for a while. I'm back now that I've decided I can't live with wondering "what if" forever and I'm giving it everything I've got. I'm 27.

I have a realistic idea of what's expected from doctors from an administrative standpoint from all of my office work at the home care and hospice. I also understand what happens when doctors mess up (one of our doctors was placed on probation-twice). Many of our daycare clients were home care patients (the home care/hospice/daycare were all under the same company) so they had advanced dementia, Parkinson's, aftercare CVA, etc.

I definitely plan on doing lots of shadowing. I have plenty of docs from work that have agreed to let me shadow them. Like I said, I get doctors from the administrative side of things because our office worked so closely with theirs for patient care, however I really want to get a closer in-depth look at their day to day grind and what their patients expect from them; not just Medicare or their fellow patient care collaborators.

I do want to try and get some more recent clinical volunteering in, I'm just not sure where or how.

 

[LizzyM]

You are 10 years out of HS which is a world away from someone who graduated HS in 2013. Get that shadowing... at some point you may find a way to squeeze in 2-3 hours/wk holding babies in the NICU or helping out in the emergency department... there are areas of the hospital that could use your services nights or weekends if that's all you've got. Why not make an appointment to talk with a volunteer coordinator in a hospital near you?