Does working as a Microbio Lab Assistant for three months count as good clinical experience for medi

[DoctoringwithV]

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[bee17]

Being a lab assistant counts as research experience, not clinical experience. Clinical experience generally involves having contact with patients and healthcare professionals, such as volunteering in a hospital, nursing home, or hospice facility.

If you know that keeping your job will cause you to do poorly on the MCAT, then you have answered your own question about whether or not you should quit.

You may get more helpful advice from other SDNers if you post your first two MCAT scores with section breakdowns.

 

[Catalystik]

1) I think this would hurt my application for medical school if I decide to call it quits because I only worked there for three months!

2) Does working as a Microbio Lab Assistant for three months count as good clinical experience for medical school?

1) Short-term employment during the college years is common, so no.

2) If you drew blood from patients, collected their urine, or swabbed their throats, this would be considered clinical experience for med school application purposes. If you had no patient interaction, that doesn't mean it wasn't a valuable employment experience regardless.

 

[bee17]

@ Catalystik Good point about patient interaction through the research. Completely slipped my mind. 😳

 

[mehc012]

@ Catalystik Good point about patient interaction through the research. Completely slipped my mind. 😳

I still wouldn't want 3mo of 'and on some days I collected patient samples' to be the only clinical experience on an app, though.

At OP: I would not say that this job is enough clinical experience overall (even if you continue, imo), but I don't think your short tenure at this position is an issue in of itself. So go ahead and quit if you think it's better for you (and it's good to see that you're taking the MCAT seriously here), and maybe find some shadowing or clinical volunteering in its place.

 

[ridethecliche]

Yeah you'd probably want more than 3 months of that if you can swing it.

Sounds like a reasonable clinical ish job.

 

[Catalystik]

I still wouldn't want 3mo of 'and on some days I collected patient samples' to be the only clinical experience on an app, though.

I agree.

 

[baxt1412]

agree with above. since direct patient interaction won't be the majority of your work, I'd include more clinical experiences in your app if you want the best shot of getting in.

 

[minor.groove]

Being a lab assistant counts as research experience, not clinical experience. Clinical experience generally involves having contact with patients and healthcare professionals, such as volunteering in a hospital, nursing home, or hospice facility.

A clinical diagonistic lab is not the same as research experience

 

[Catalystik]

A clinical diagonistic lab is not the same as research experience

You are correct, however the designation that one can select on the AMCAS application form reads "Research/Lab. Some in the OP's position might choose that category, or they might (more correctly, IMO) pick "Paid Employment-(non)Medical/Clinical.

 

[Doug Underhill]

What about if you're interacting with patients, but not actually performing procedures on them very often? I'm up at the front desk scheduling appointments, helping them with forms, assigning charts, apologizing for how long our in-clinic pharmacy is taking (we have a lot of this) and other things like that.

With regards to the old "smell patients" test, I have definitely smelled some of them before but not all are malodorous.

 

[LizzyM]

With regards to the old "smell patients" test, I have definitely smelled some of them before but not all are malodorous.

The point of that saying is that you need not touch the patients to have a clinical experience but you should be close enough ... Some of them may smell of aftershave or talcum powder, not every scent is a bad one.

 

[DoctoringwithV]

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[DoctoringwithV]

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[DoctoringwithV]

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[mehc012]

I believe three months is perfectly fine.


I respectfully disagree. Three months working overtime is surely enough experience. 500 hours is enough for me.

If I wanted to work at another lab for pay, then I would suggest to anyone to stay past the one year mark for good experience. But since we're students, seasonal work like this is great.

The issue is NOT the 3mo...in fact, I explicitly said that nobody would ding you for short tenure at the position (though if you're going to just disagree/ignore the opinions given to you on here, I'm not sure why you bothered asking SDN anyway).

The issue is that it's kind of a 'meh' clinical experience. It's not the quantity, it's the quality.

Granted, there's not much description, but we're honestly giving benefit of the doubt by assuming that there's some sort of sample gathering to even remotely qualify this as 'clinical'. It seems to be primarily a research position. If it's labelled 'Microbio Lab Assistant' and it's the main entry under clinical, that'll raise some eyebrows. Even if it turns out that you spend a day or so each week collecting samples from patients, that's not the main gist of the job, and the adcoms can't really tell from the outside whether it's enough to be meaningful and to give you an idea of what it'd be like to be a doctor working with sick patients. So I stand by my statement that I would not want it to be the only clinical entry on my app, regardless of the timeframe. You could do it for 8yrs and I'd still say to get some other clinical experiences in there.

Now, upon closer reread, it sounds like you've got some other, actual, clinical stuff, so they're fine...because this isn't your main clinical entry.

 

[mehc012]

Yes, that is true. To be clear, I don't work at a hospital, I work at a Clinical Diagnostic Lab that takes specimens shipped from other kaiser hospitals and we run the tests on them and send the reports to the doctors. I spoke with doctors over the phone plenty times.
I never touched or heard from a patient, but I got bits and pieces of them in specimen containers. I've received stools, blood, urine, and tissue. We get bone tissue, brain tissue, hip, and even a toe.

Processing sterile sites was great fun and you learn a great deal on the job.

See, this is exactly what I was alluding to.
I never once said it wasn't enough hours. I actually said the opposite. I said it wasn't enough clinical experience. Now that you've described it...it's simply not clinical experience. See the bolded in your quote. That's what makes it nonclinical. Heck, it's not even really research experience. It's a good job, sounds interesting...but it doesn't fit either of those categories.

 

[DoctoringwithV]

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[mehc012]

I'm not unrelaxed, just clarifying!