I don't think that we can go back as far as high school, but if you did it while in college....perhaps.
Well in all fairness, you guys scold people for wanting to list other certain meaningful activities and tell them that those activities are useless.
Teaching Sunday School for 20 hours/wk?? That would be worth listing. Two hours per week, not so much if it would supplant a more significant experience to make 15.
I see what you are saying now. It's not about the nature of the activity, it's about the commitment. I agree that 2 hours of Sunday School is nothing to brag about.
StudyShy, I think it's a great activity as part of your 15. What are you going to be using the CV for though?
I'm not an adcom, but I think that work experience is an extremely valuable activity that teaches you a whole lot of important things that are relevant to medicine: dealing with "customers," working within a team, working in the context of a "system," among others. The work experience itself is irrelevant.
It's always about both, and the long-term commitment you mentioned plays a role too. A lot of volunteer positions are 4 hours/week or every-other week (the equivalent of 2 hours/week). But if you stick with them for 3 or four years, you will have accumulated several hundred volunteer hours.
And then there's the fact that the value of a Sunday School teacher derives from certain background assumptions that are not universal....
Let's face it, there are only 168 hours in a week. If you can get a job where you can study while working (library circulation desk is one of the most common in this regard, late night babysitting and reception work are others) you can stretch an hour to cover two activities. Attend meetings held at mealtime and you've combined a necessary activity with a resume builder.
Depends how you present it. I think there's a lot of value in teaching that could be discussed almost regardless of the subject matter taught.
So what happens when the duration of one commitment requires you to forego opportunities among the Big Seven you mentioned? Is is possible to go about ranking "genre" of activities by perceived importance?
You mean there are a lot of applicants that have never had a real job? I always thought every college kid did some type of part-time work for some spending money? This is new to me.
yeah, i know, that was a poor attempt at humor... although i think it does bear mentioning that your perceptions about the importance of a certain EC on your app are probably not objective. this is in response to some posts i've seen from people seeking validation about how awesome so-and-so experience was, who then becoming embittered when others indicate that this does anything less than guarantee an acceptance
It's shocking to me too, but I occasionally meet people in college who have never had a job in their entire life. I go to one of the cheapest universities in the country and have to work part-time during school and full-time every summer in order to afford college at all, so I don't really get how people are doing this.
Yeah, I was already typing when you wrote your j/K post so I didn't see it
I believe everyone should have 100 hours per year for active volunteer service. That works out to 2 hours per week for three years for the typical applicant who applies after 3 years of college. While some people do clinical volunteering, if you've obtained clinical experience on the job, you might do 2 hours per week as a literacy volunteer, grade school tutor, soup kitchen helpler, assistant scout leader. Some people might do one thing every week year round, and some may do a mix of things by season (coaching little league, working with Special Olympics, alternative spring break)
There are some princesses (and princes) who have never worked a day in their lives. What they are getting into in medicine can be a rude awakening.
medical students are overwhelmingly selected from the upper upper middle class and higher. your shock will only be heightened once you get here.
Do you hold this against them? I'm wondering if you had two completely equal candidates and one had some grocery store-type job and the other had not worked in high school or college- would that be detrimental. Should people seek out some sort of employment even if they feel they don't need it?
HA. Yeah, it's supremely exciting. Granted I interviewed predominantly at "top" schools where many students probably didn't have to work, but still. I think work experience should be an unstated requirement because of how valuable the experience is.
Seriously man, I'm still in disbelief. I thought even the wealthy kids did some type of work during college because they were taught that hard work = success.
Here's proof:
Yeah- that makes sense. You need to be doing at least something with your time, but a paycheck doesn't necessarily make it a better experience.
Every year, I update my resume. Several years ago, I deleted non-professional work before I attained my degree. For med school, I need to account for all my time since high school. Demonstrating that I worked so that I graduated debt-free is admirable, however a full-ride scholarship would have been a lot nicer!
CV for letter writers, definitely put it on. Higher class? pfft. Blue collar roots ftw. I seriously hope my kids, grandkids, and so on don't consider themselves pedigreed, cause it will never be true.Every year, I update my resume. Several years ago, I deleted non-professional work before I attained my degree. For med school, I need to account for all my time since high school. Demonstrating that I worked so that I graduated debt-free is admirable, however a full-ride scholarship would have been a lot nicer!
I formulated a CV for the application process. I'm giving a copy to the professors who I will be requesting an LOR from this week.
It would have been nice if I came from a higher class. I'm the first person in my family to graduate from college, although I hear that I had a distant relative who was a physician on horseback (medical school was not necessary during that time).
Stipends do exist in college, you know...And rich parents...and drug dealing...and student loans...
More people (in college) than you think have parents that were able to save at least a little bit for college.
If I'm right in assuming that you value the actual experience of working over the time expenditure, then would you want the work exp. to be in college specifically and why? I don't plan to get a job of the type discussed here (bagging groceries, working at a department store like you Nick, other typical blue-collar jobs) ever again, but I had three of the sort throughout the course of high school.
LOL no. Unfortunately a lot of kids who are that wealthy are handed everything. This is the same reason rich kids do drugs too; they can afford whatever they want with their $100+ weekly allowance (and that's seriously low-balling it for some people.)
If that's the person's most comparable experience to working, then obviously. However, there's nothing wrong with a stereotypical leadership position like that as it relates to this discussion as long as the applicant also has EC's that are actually time-consuming, like volunteering.
Cool!Great thread guys. A link to it will be included in the new Work and Activites FAQ that the Pre-Allo staff is working on
There's a new autobiographical section on the AMCAS where you should have the opportunity to clarify how you grew up; I sure you could include working through college as a continuation of growing up below the poverty line.
I think the key with these types of work experiences is that you learn to be in an environment where you're responsible to someone else for your time. Bagging groceries would suck. Some of the jobs I've had weren't fun either. But doing them successfully shows your ability to get the job done and not consider something "beneath" you. If you go into rotations in med school with some attitude of entitlement that's a carryover from your privileged childhood and lack of employment/responsibility, you will be put in your place in fairly short order, and until that time you'll be a huge pain to your fellow rotators. Once in the wards, you're really the lowest of the low... you can't be running around thinking that something is beneath you. If we were students together, I definitely wouldn't want you on my rotations while you were trying to dump your work off on everyone else. So I think holding "low level" jobs helps assure adcoms that you have the ability to do what's expected of you and won't be complaining when you have to go do a rectal.
Only if your parent has a PhD in art history or some other useless "artistic" major.
I was wondering about this with the new changes to the AMCAS application. So now it is basically left up to the adcoms to determine if the student was disadvantaged or not? This seems more reasonable. I know a lot of people were questioning whether or not they should consider themselves "disadvantaged".
