EC Dilemma

[UpQuark]

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Currently a Junior and I need advice on my ECs. My ECs are mediocre at best (compared to many I have seen on SDN). Here is the break down of my activities over the past two years.

Freshman Year: Volunteer at Cardiopulmonary Department at Local Hospital (~70 hours spring break and summer)

Sophomore Year: Premedical club (not much leadership), Research (12 hrs a week - getting 3rd author publication, in the process of submission), Hospital volunteer 4hrs/week (ER) for 3 months at my University Hospital

Summer '10 - SURF Program

Junior Year (current): Research, ER volunteer, and Math Tutor at an elementary schools (Academic Emergency). I plan on continuing these activities throughout the school year. I am going to shadow two physicians over winter break.

I also want to become an Undergraduate TA for Cell Biology Lab but I feel that with my course load and my ECs this year, I will not have time to study for the MCAT which I plan to take May/June. I'm thinking of dropping my Hospital volunteering for winter quarter to TA, and pick it back up spring quarter.

Any thoughts as to how I should approach this? Should I keep my clinical experience ongoing (have about 100 right now) or TA - I do not have time to do both simultaneously winter quarter.

 

[Altruisticism]

I am inquiring this because what if lets say an Englishman completed his BMBS in the British system and decided to catch up with the technology mostly developing in the US. My question is what are the procedures nowadays as apposed to 20/30 years ago ?

 

[Altruisticism]

pardon me. i posted an incorrect response in the incorrect thread.

 

[Mr Hippopotamus]

1. What's a SURF program?
2. Your EC's don't seem that light. You've got a 100 hours of clinical, which is basically the requirement. You've got your name on research papers. I'd scale back the hospital volunteering to make sure you nail your MCAT. Because ultimately that's going to be more influential than another hundred hours of volunteering. TAing is better than volunteering, it shows that you can help others grasp complex ideas. Since a lot of med schools are big on collaboration between students, that will speak in your favor.

 

[UpQuark]

1. What's a SURF program?
2. Your EC's don't seem that light. You've got a 100 hours of clinical, which is basically the requirement. You've got your name on research papers. I'd scale back the hospital volunteering to make sure you nail your MCAT. Because ultimately that's going to be more influential than another hundred hours of volunteering. TAing is better than volunteering, it shows that you can help others grasp complex ideas. Since a lot of med schools are big on collaboration between students, that will speak in your favor.

SURF = Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (I did mine in Neuroscience) - It's basically a 10 week full time (40hrs a week) research program in which I had my own project and presented a poster.

Thanks for the advice. I think I'll go with the TAing position (Actually it's called assistant TA where the graduate TA heads the class and I'm there to help students with the experiments).

 

[NickNaylor]

My general advice about ECs is the following:

1) Do things you think you'll enjoy
2) Do things that you can somehow tie back into your interest in medicine (whether that be learning about the career directly or learning about/developing certain qualities you think will be useful in a medical career)
3) Do things you can talk about significantly and/or that are interesting

As far as between the two, I think you can probably drop the clinical volunteering and be fine. If you have a teaching interest or are considering academic medicine, I would definitely recommend the TAing position, but I don't think you can necessarily go wrong either way. TAing might be a little more unique than hospital volunteering. Personally I've loved my teaching experiences, so I would recommend teaching to everyone if they're able to do it.