Gap year humanities/non-STEM opportunities that are not service?

[Constantius]

I'm not particularly interested in the conventional options available for pre-med gap years (e.g. biomedical/clinical research, volunteering, clinical work, etc.), which means that the resources available to me are also fairly limited, and I'm not quite sure where to even start. My personal preference would be to do some sort of humanities/anthropology-based work, either in academia or outside of it.

I've been looking into academic fellowships since I'm highly interested in going into academic medicine in the future (non-STEM though, clearly), but all of the non-STEM ones that I've looked at so far require some sort of commitment to graduate school by the end of the program. I am considering pursuing a master's or PhD, but only after obtaining an MD and not before or at the same time. Perhaps this will also only harm me in my search for opportunities, but I'm majoring in biology rather than social sciences/humanities. However, my coursework is about 50/50 split between STEM and non-STEM, and I've been involved in humanities-based work and research for about a year. Although it's not a primary interest of mine, interdisciplinary opportunities bridging science and humanities would be great also.

Does anyone have any suggestions for opportunities they've heard of or even personal experiences that might help?

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[TelemarketingEnigma]

Are you interested in bioethics? I know of a few places that offer postbacc/fellowship positions for bioethics (NIH and Mayo for sure, maybe Hastings Center? and probably others I don't know of). Thats a good interdisciplinary field. You can also look at places that offer more traditional postbacc research positions and see if there are any labs doing more humanities focused work - for example, I know people who did the NIH IRTA program in labs focused on Health Disparities research.

Also, are you interested in science/health/research policy work at all? While those types of positions may or may not directly involve "humanities" they can be an interesting avenue outside of the typical laboratory or clinical jobs. My personal gap years were in one of these positions - I got to do a little science, policy, humanities, and administration work all bundled into one. (You can PM me if you'd like to know more - I'd rather not post the specific program for anonymity's sake)

 

[Constantius]

Are you interested in bioethics? I know of a few places that offer postbacc/fellowship positions for bioethics (NIH and Mayo for sure, maybe Hastings Center? and probably others I don't know of). Thats a good interdisciplinary field. You can also look at places that offer more traditional postbacc research positions and see if there are any labs doing more humanities focused work - for example, I know people who did the NIH IRTA program in labs focused on Health Disparities research.

Also, are you interested in science/health/research policy work at all? While those types of positions may or may not directly involve "humanities" they can be an interesting avenue outside of the typical laboratory or clinical jobs. My personal gap years were in one of these positions - I got to do a little science, policy, humanities, and administration work all bundled into one. (You can PM me if you'd like to know more - I'd rather not post the specific program for anonymity's sake)

Hey! My primary interests are more so along the lines of narrative medicine, the medical humanities, patient-doctor discourse, and media studies, particularly the use of multimedia and interactive media in various arenas of healthcare - all pretty niche interests, I think. Outside of medicine I'm oriented towards cultural and linguistic anthropology, which are... not completely unrelated to medicine but clearly not common areas of study for pre-meds given my struggle to find gap year opps that cater to these interests. I've given public health/health policy a try, and although I appreciate it greatly as a field, I've never become personally interested in it. Even so, it'd be great to learn more from you because it's worth casting a net wide, and perhaps it'll interest me more than other policy opportunities I've encountered/experienced before.