- Joined
- Jul 23, 2012
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If you're doing your homework at home, then I'm assuming the person is signing in and ditching. That's wrong, and there's no argument for it. As for doing it in the lobby, I'm not sure why someone would spend time in another part of the hospital. They would likely get in trouble or maybe they are also ditching their shifts, who knows. If you're doing it on the floor though, you are technically available since any staff member can come up to you and ask you to perform a task. I'm guessing the majority of volunteers will oblige, though they won't be happy about it. Therefore, I disagree that these people are unavailable if they are doing homework or studying on the floor. Instead, I think they might convey a poor attitude, but that's about it. They are at least doing the minimal amount of work that's expected, and that's that.
Pre-meds volunteer at a significantly higher rate than anyone else in this country. I think the data shows that around ~90% of medical school matriculants have volunteered. On the other hand, the number of people that volunteered in the general population is much lower. I highly doubt that pre-meds are some sort of morally superior human beings. Therefore, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that a good number of these pre-meds aren't here by choice, and are instead volunteering because it is an unwritten requirement for medical school. This is why they tend to have a piss poor attitude. As I said in this very thread in 2013, you'd expect with the number of pre-meds that volunteer, that they would be given a humanism award or something. But that's not the case. Instead, it's quite to the contrary... They are viewed in a very negative light by hospital staff! Perhaps it's just a continuous cycle of pre-meds starting volunteer work, and staff treating them like crap off the bat. This probably makes them passive-aggressive and purposely do as poor of a job as possible. I'm sure most of these "crappy" volunteers (as long as they didn't do anything unethical) end up as perfectly good medical student and physicians further down the line. I think that volunteer coordinators need to crack down on poorly performing volunteers (after all, they are being paid to do their job), or there needs to be a centralized system which allows volunteer performance to be objectively graded.
While a lot of this is the volunteer's fault, I blame the hospital staff too in some instances. For example, if they are treating a brand new pre-med volunteer like crap, then that's completely wrong. Whether the volunteer is an elderly person doing it because they genuinely enjoy it or pre-med that is doing it to check a box, they are BOTH volunteering their time to help the organization! They BOTH deserve to be treated with respect! It's no surprise that these pre-med volunteers that are giving their time away to work for free are doing a piss poor job when they are being treated like slaves!
I agree, these experiences will likely be embellished and portrayed in a positive light on the application. But then again, most people tend to embellish their experiences. If one's volunteer experience is 99% scut work, they will write mostly about their good 1% experiences. I had some great experiences in the hospital during volunteering, and I wrote about them in my personal statement. But they were very few and far between, and thus my experience still sucked terribly as a whole. I think that people may also over-dramatize certain experiences, kind of like the Discovery Channel. This probably occurs in lots of application. I'm sure some people also might make up experiences out of thin air (especially those that ditched or completely lied about their experiences), but perhaps ADCOMs can sniff this out more easily.
