Has anyone slightly inflated their volunteer hours on their application?

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Tofurkey

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Hello,

I wondered if anyone out there inflates their volunteer hours on their application, and if so, if med schools check up on these sorts of things. For instance, if I volunteer for one hour a week at a hospital, and I say on my app it was 2 or 3 hours--is that such a bad thing?

Just wondering what people's opinions on this topic are.
😍
 
FYI:

I am surprised your hospital that you volunteered at doesn't have one of those computers that you sign in with all your hours on it. I volunteered an avg. of three hours. If it was 2 hours and 55 minutes one day, I would still round it to three hours. However, I wouldn't lie. Sometimes they do check out certain parts of your application so it is always better to tell the truth. I was truthful because if they called up the hospital checking they could easily verify if I was telling the truth or not by simply asking someone to look up all the hours that I had logged in & the dates.
 
Originally posted by Tofurkey
if I volunteer for one hour a week at a hospital, and I say on my app it was 2 or 3 hours--is that such a bad thing?

ummm...why would you? do you think it would double your chances of admission!? don't be silly. medicine is a profession highly concerned with ethics. you probably won't get caught for it but if you do the consequences are severe - and the gain is questionable at best.
 
Originally posted by Tofurkey
Hello,

I wondered if anyone out there inflates their volunteer hours on their application, and if so, if med schools check up on these sorts of things. For instance, if I volunteer for one hour a week at a hospital, and I say on my app it was 2 or 3 hours--is that such a bad thing?

Just wondering what people's opinions on this topic are.
😍

That won't be the factor that gets you admitted.
Do whatever you want but its your risk and your little voice in your head.
 
Originally posted by Tofurkey
Hello,

I wondered if anyone out there inflates their volunteer hours on their application, and if so, if med schools check up on these sorts of things. For instance, if I volunteer for one hour a week at a hospital, and I say on my app it was 2 or 3 hours--is that such a bad thing?

Just wondering what people's opinions on this topic are.
😍

I would do it because it doesn't matter in the end. Unless you have a rec from the doc contradicting what you write, med shools won't care. I once shadowed a doc in a hospital for about 20 hrs a month. I had to give him a form to sign and i told him I don't remember how many hours I shadowed him. So he winked at me and put in 50. These things really don't matter in the "real world".
 
Originally posted by indo
That won't be the factor that gets you admitted.
Do whatever you want but its your risk and your little voice in your head.

I always try to do what the voices tell me...
 
Are med schools known for checking up on these things? The reason I ask is because so many people I know have done it--like making up whole essays on things that never happened in their so-called volunteer experiences. So I figured, why not? Who will ever know?

Or what if you volunteered for a couple of months but said it was a whole year?
 
Not trying to scare you...

I know of a top graduate school that accepted an applicant whose entire application was a fraud. They figured it out, denied her acceptance, and I think she had criminal charges issued.

She later ended up with life in prison I think because she later killed someone, took them to a dental office, and tried to swap dental records with her own so people would think she was dead.

So the question is... if you start fibbing on a few questions... where might you end up!

You think I am kidding, but I am not.

Heard it from the head of the grad department.

I know this is just a fudge, but really think "Is it worth it"
 
What if you stop asking hypothetical questions about how much lying you can get away with?
 
I could be wrong, but I don't think volunteer experiences are quite as important as they are hyped up to be on this forum. A little bit of clinical experience to be able to say you have some idea of what you are getting yourself into is what is important. Of course, all that pales in comparison to your GPA/MCAT which are impossible to lie about. If you lie about your clinical experiences, nobody will ever know, but come on....it isn't going to help you and it is just plain wrong. What if I bill insurance companies for procedures I never performed...hmmmm...will they ever know? I could use a little extra $$....
 
Originally posted by Giving My .02
Not trying to scare you...

I know of a top graduate school that accepted an applicant whose entire application was a fraud. They figured it out, denied her acceptance, and I think she had criminal charges issued.

She later ended up with life in prison I think because she later killed someone, took them to a dental office, and tried to swap dental records with her own so people would think she was dead.

So the question is... if you start fibbing on a few questions... where might you end up!

You think I am kidding, but I am not.

Heard it from the head of the grad department.

I know this is just a fudge, but really think "Is it worth it"

jeezus...talk about a slippery slope
 
BE HONEST

The truth is the ONLY thing that you have, and if you lose it then you have nothing else.

How many scumbags do you see out there that get through life by being dishonest?

I know this sounds harsh, but let's not set patterns early. Too often do I see people in the professional world, DOCTORS especially who will lie and cheat to get ahead or get out of a situation. If there's one thing that makes a good doctor, it's responsibility.
 
Your conscience is your own to deal with, I agree with others here that it is unethical to lie about something like volunteer experiences on an application but I personally don't feel it is "immoral" (I would reserve that classification for activities that cause harm to others, which I don't think this really would). While it is true that it doesn't exactly indicate a strong value system such as one would hope to find in a would-be physician, it's not unlike the routine resume padding and embellishments that go on every day in the corporate world.

That said, assuming you don't have any huge moral qualms about doing such a thing, you have to ask yourself if the payoff is worth the risk. It's highly unlikely that anyone would ever check up on something like that, but if you do get found out somehow--and you never know who knows who, or who's going to say what in a letter, and I speak from experience as someone who has been surprised more than once at the weird and seemingly random connections life can make between apparently unrelated people and events--you're pretty much ruined, as lying on an application, even a relatively small lie, will essentially gaurantee you a rejection and possibly blacklist your name at other schools as well. If you got caught after acceptance, it would likely be grounds for the revoking of said acceptance or expulsion from med school, if it were found that you blatantly lied. And for what? A very slightly more impressive EC? It just doesn't hold up to a cost/benefit analysis--the risk of getting caught is very small, but the price if you are found out is potentially huge, and way out of proportion to any small benefit it would have for your application.
 
Also keep in mind that it is not just quantity but the quality of the volunteer work you do that matters.
 
I think it's a stupid thing to do, but it's up to you.

BTW, I'm proud to say that I enjoyed each of my honest volunteer hours.
 
Apart from the entire honesty thing, my questions is why would you volunteer for ONE hour?! Is your schedule so busy that you can't fit more time in?

Volunteering is on everybody's application, and ONE hour per week makes it look like you are doing it just to list it.

I wouldn't even waste the time listing the one hour on the application because it makes you volunteer services look like a joke.
 
i had trouble remembering how many hours i volunteered, and participated in extracurriculars
its been a few years since i graduated college, so there is NO WAY that i will remember the number of hours of each activity, especially the ones during freshman and sophmore year

i probably underestimated some hours while overestimating others

it is ridiculous to think that the number of hours will make or break you in this application process

i definitely wouldn't consciously lie though
cuz you seriously will never know what could happen
and then you will be screwed for the rest of your life
 
i am proud to say that my whole app is the truth. i didnt lie bout anything. in fact i may have deflated hours so it would believable. i just hope everyone else is saying the truth too.

you are going to be a professional. if you will be lieing now, i dont think this is the profession for u.

further, i really dont think that extra 2 hrs would make a diff or faking whole essays. you need to be able to explain during the interview. interviewers can tell. its not ethical anyway; unfair to the honest people. i hope your not going into medicine for money, a secure job, respect, etc. if you were passionate, i think u would do more than an hour.
but i dont know u. so i will not judge u or others. so sorry if i offend anyone. good luck
 
well, now this brings up something I had been wondering about on my AMCAS; when I filled in one volunteer position I put the start and finish dates, but there were some periods when I took time off for school, like 10 weeks once and then another 6 weeks at another time. I did volunteer about 240 hours total according to the clock kept by the Volunteer office, and it was 4 hours a week, but on my AMCAS I wasn't sure how to express all this information. It was basically over a year and a half.

Maybe I should've just written 13 months but then the dates would've been weird. I definitely agonized over this and in the end I just put the dates. I wasn't sure how to do this and even today I am still bother by it; I definitely DIDN"T want to lie or overstate it, and if anyone has any ideas on how to address this I would appreciate it.

If I am asked about it in an interview I would absolutely admit to taking time off for exams or finals. I take this stuff really seriously, and my little voice is very loud unfortunately. I don't like to lie.
 
That is a good point paws. I have all sorts of little questions like that on this app. How in depth should the description of experiences be? Should I draft them out first? Do they need to be full 500 words? How important are these summaries?
 
Originally posted by Paws
my little voice is very loud unfortunately. I don't like to lie.

No, FORTUNATELY.

if that is true, you will be a great doctor 🙂
 
Actually, now that I've just written that out, I am totally obsessing about this; I mean does this make me a liar? Will schools reject me if I say I took time off for my rough courses? It was great clinical experience and my supervisor always told me it was ok to take time off and focus on my classes - she was very supportive. I think if anyone ever called the volunteer office they would get a nice review of me - the coordinator always HUGS me 🙂 .

Dang, I would NOT make a good sociopath and I take things way too seriously ... this whole process is so agonizing
 
Actually some schools (Mayo) take volunteering very very seriously, not hours but TIME (years wise) spent volunteering just FYI.
 
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