Could this substitute for volunteering?

[justin984]

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[Law2Doc]

I've never thought of this before because I've been doing it for so long, but my dad and I have run a 24/7 computer repair business for a few years now. It's been open since 89 and I've run it by myself a few times for up to a year and a half while he was unable to.

Now, I still want to do some shadowing (lots of shadowing.. sounds fun! 🙂 ) but could my work experience substitute for volunteering? Between school and work I have very little time to volunteer.

Good gpa, good mcat, some shadowing and the biz.. is that enough to make me stand out as an applicant?

Depends on what you meant by volunteering. Volunteering per se isn't a requirement for most med schools. Good clinical experience/exposure basically is. So if you get this through shadowing, that's great. If you mean "volunteering" as in clinical experience; i.e. volunteering in, say, an ER, then no, you don't get the same benefit of consideration doing employment instead -- The computer business will look good as an EC, but isn't per se, a substitute.
Or do you mean "volunteering" in terms of charitable work/community service? Some schools (especially state schools with requirements to provide benefits for underserved populations within the state) do want to see a level of committment to community service. But most schools (esp. private schools) don't really require this for admission. If you want to go to one of the former types of school, then again, no, your computer job won't count, but again, is a decent EC.
Hope that clarifies.

 

[justin984]

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[njbmd]

Thanks. Thats what I needed to know. 🙂
I know it varies but how many hours of shadowing would you say are needed to be competitive? Does it look bad if you have no volunteer experience, just shadowing?

Hi there,
There is no maximum or minimum numbers of hours that will magically fulfill this portion of your application. Say for an example that a student submits an application with 3 hours of volunteering and another submits an application that has several examples of community service throughout his or her career that shows an interest in the health of the community. Who do you think will get accepted (assuming that other portions of the application are comparable)?

You need to have some meaningful shadowing/clinical experience and you need to have some meaningful volunteer/community service that you can discuss intelligently during an interview. The number of hours is not as important as the quality of those experiences. Find some quality experiences that can enrich your application.

njbmd 🙂