Extra curriculars?

[kangar00]

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what do you guys think about the number of hours of volunteering you need on a yearly basis?
I used to volunteer regularly freshman year, but this year I've been so busy with my new club that I haven't done any hospital volunteering at all.
I do have a lot of shadowing experience from the summers, which i think also counts as clinical experience?
but i haven't done any research either.
What do i need to do to get into a top tier med school?

i've been finding myself extremely busy with extracurriculars lately because i'm president of a new club on campus. but then i realized that i don't have as much volunteer work as I probably should.

Here's there ECs i'm currently involved in:
- president of one organization
- alpha phi omega service fraternity
- alpha epsilon delta pre-med fraternity

 

[sgtbrushes]

As others have stated, there are no bottom-line numbers for ECs. ECs are, in my opinion, a way to get your foot in the door. When you are at your interview, are you going to be able to speak intelligently about shadowing, volunteering, and any other ECs? If they ask you about volunteering and you say, "It was good because I like to help people," you look like a dolt! I think 25 hours of volunteering, during four years of school, probably isn't enough, but I don't think you need 100 hours a year, either.

 

[J ROD]

Schools like to see 3-4 hrs/wk for about 1.5 yrs.....and do about 75 hrs shadowing....

Get back at it!!

 

[TheMightySmiter]

Agreed with the above posters. There's no minimum or anything, and what you do is much more important than how many hours you do it. That doesn't mean you can get away with having 5 hours of volunteering. But if you volunteer at one place for a couple of years and had a lot of patient contact and some great experiences, you'll do better than if you got more hours volunteering at, like, eight places to which you had no obvious commitment.

 

[kangar00]

Thanks!

I was also wondering, do these volunteer and shadowing experiences count as "clinical experience"?

I never knew the exact definition of that because I've shadowed in a lot of pediatric and other kinds of hospital clinics.